Bildnis eines weißhaarigen Mannes

Rembrandt signed and dated this near the top of the canvas in 1667, and he had two years left to live. It is one of the last portraits he both signed and dated. The man has never been identified. He wears the plain black of a well-off Amsterdam burgher, his hair long in the fashion of the late 1660s, and Rembrandt turned the brush around and scratched into that hair with the handle while the paint was still wet. His right hand runs off the lower edge of the picture, so the body seems to carry on past the frame. That December, Cosimo de' Medici, the young heir to Tuscany, was touring Holland and called on Rembrandt in his rented rooms on the Rozengracht. Melbourne bought the portrait in 1951 with money from the Felton Bequest.