Simeon im Tempel

By 1669 Rembrandt was in his final year, his fortune long gone, his house and collection sold off to pay his creditors. This picture was on his easel when he died that October, still unfinished. It shows old Simeon in the temple at Jerusalem, holding the Christ child he had waited his whole life to see and speaking the old prayer that begins, now you let your servant go in peace. The paint is thin and worked with almost nothing, faces built from a few loaded strokes with long stretches of bare ground left showing. The woman standing behind Simeon was probably added later by another hand in the workshop, after Rembrandt was gone.