Portrait of a Man with Millstone Collar

Rembrandt left Leiden for Amsterdam around 1631, at 25, and worked out of the house of the dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, which ran as a portrait shop for the city's merchant families. This sitter was one of them, and nobody knows his name. What the panel does record exactly is his collar, the sort the Dutch called a millstone ruff. It took several metres of fine linen, starched and set into figure-of-eight folds with heated irons, and hours of work to get right. By 1632 younger Amsterdammers were already going over to flat collars, so this was a conservative choice. The portrait of his wife, dated a year later, still hangs beside him in Brunswick. Both panels are ovals, cut down from rectangular boards of oak.