Mann in orientalischer Tracht („Der edle Slawe“ oder „Mann mit Turban“)

Rembrandt painted this in 1632, just after he moved from the small town of Leiden to Amsterdam, the busy port at the centre of Dutch trade with the wider world. The man in the huge turban and the gold-embroidered robe looks like an Eastern prince, but he is almost certainly a Dutchman, a studio model who turns up in other pictures of the time in ordinary clothes. Fantasy portraits of imagined Persian and Ottoman nobles were fashionable then, feeding off the new contact between Dutch merchants and the ports of the Levant. Rembrandt used the costume as an excuse to show off. Notice the loose, confident brushwork on the fabrics and the way the light drops the background into shadow so the figure steps forward. He was 26, freshly arrived, and out to make his name in the city.