John the Baptist Preaching

Rembrandt made this around 1634, soon after moving to Amsterdam and marrying Saskia, when commissions were pouring in. It is painted almost entirely in shades of brown, a grisaille, probably worked up as a design he could later turn into a print. John the Baptist stands mid-sermon with an arm flung up, but the real subject is the crowd, roughly a hundred people packed around him, and Rembrandt gives each a different response: rapt, bored, arguing, a child playing in the dirt, a dog. He sets turbaned and foreign-looking figures at the edges to suggest the whole world listening. Years later he fitted the little panel into a painted frame of his own, crowded with still more figures.