Portrait of a Man

In 1632 Rembrandt had just moved from his home town of Leiden to Amsterdam, the busy commercial capital of the young Dutch Republic and the hardest place in the country to win portrait commissions. He was in his mid-twenties, and work like this is how he did it. The oval shape was the fashionable frame of the moment, and the sitter wears the wide starched linen ruff of a prosperous Amsterdammer. Look at how those folds are painted, in quick confident strokes that catch the light rather than counting every thread. We no longer know who the man was. The inscription that gives his age as 40 was added later by another hand, so even that small certainty is borrowed.