Self-portrait

You are looking at a man in the last year of his life. Rembrandt painted this in 1669, one of three self-portraits he made that final year, and he died in October, in Amsterdam, poor and largely out of fashion. By then he had painted himself perhaps 80 times across his career, from a cocky young success to this. There is no costume here, no props, nothing to hide behind. He simply studies his own ageing face, the loose skin and tired eyes, with the same unsparing attention he had once given to wealthy clients. The paint on the flesh is thick and worked, built up in ridges you could almost feel, the surface of an old man rendered by an old man's hand.