Artist in his studio

Rembrandt made this around 1628, when he was barely 22 and still working in his home town of Leiden, years before the fame and the big Amsterdam commissions. It is a small panel, and most of it is empty room. A painter in a worn robe stands back against the far wall, dwarfed by the huge blank panel on the easel that turns its back to us. You cannot see what he is working on. He simply looks at it, brushes and palette in hand, as if the deciding happens before the paint does. Scholars still argue whether the small figure is Rembrandt himself. On the wall beside him hang the grinding stone and muller he would have used to make his own colours.