Rembrandt Laughing

Around 1628 Rembrandt was barely 22 and still working in his home town of Leiden, sharing a studio with his friend Jan Lievens and using the cheapest model he had, which was his own face. He painted this laughing head on a small sheet of copper, a surface that holds paint like enamel and gives the skin its glassy shine. It is a tronie, a study of an expression rather than a portrait of anyone in particular, and of the roughly 80 self-portraits he left, only two show him smiling. For a long time this one was filed under the name of a lesser contemporary. It surfaced again in 2007, and close study of the copper and the brushwork brought it back to Rembrandt himself.