Bust of a Bearded Old Man

By 1633 Rembrandt had left his home town of Leiden and settled in Amsterdam, where wealthy merchants were queuing for portraits and commissions were filling his workshop. This little panel belongs to the quieter side of that career. It is a tronie, a study of a type rather than a named sitter: an old man with a full beard, worked up entirely in greys and browns. It is the smallest painting known by his hand, and one of very few he left in this monochrome grisaille technique. Painters used grisaille to sort out light and shade, and often as a model an engraver could copy into a print. Rembrandt laid this one in quickly and with complete confidence, in a single sitting, changing nothing as he went. The face is nobody in particular; what he was studying was age itself, the folds and hollows of an old head, set down on a panel smaller than your hand.