Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar

By the time Rembrandt painted this in 1659 he had lived for three years under the terms of his insolvency, in a rented house on the Rozengracht after creditors sold the grand one he could no longer afford. Yet he gave himself the bearing of a Renaissance gentleman. The turned-up fur collar, the beret and the calm three-quarter pose echo Italian portraits by Raphael and Titian that Rembrandt had studied and sketched at auction in Amsterdam years earlier. The light strikes only the face and the loosely clasped hands and leaves the rest in brown shadow. He was 53, and this belongs to a run of self-portraits he made almost yearly through his final decade.