Simeons Lobgesang

Rembrandt was 25 and still in Leiden, the town where he was born, when he painted this in 1631. Within months he would leave for Amsterdam and the portrait commissions that made his name. The scene is from Luke's gospel: Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem, and the old man Simeon, who had been promised he would not die before seeing the Messiah, takes the child and gives thanks. Rembrandt sets Simeon in a shaft of light inside a vast shadowed temple, his face tilted up, the baby the brightest thing in the picture. Joseph kneels nearby holding the two doves the family brought as their offering. It is a small panel, worked with the fine, close detail of his Leiden years.