Self-portrait

Late in 1632 Rembrandt was 26, newly settled in Amsterdam and kept busy painting the city's merchants in black suits and starched ruffs. On this small oak panel, barely 22 centimetres high, he dresses himself exactly like one of those clients, in black clothes, a white ruff and a broad felt hat with a gold-trimmed band. He very rarely showed himself this way, and one suggestion is that the picture worked as a kind of calling card for the respectable portrait painter he wanted to be seen as. By 1970 scholars had grown doubtful about it, and it sold at Sotheby's in London for £650. Tree-ring analysis later showed that the panel was cut from the same Baltic oak as another portrait he painted that year, and when Sotheby's offered it again in July 2020, as one of the very few Rembrandt self-portraits still in private hands, it fetched about £14.5 million.