Self-portrait with dishevelled hair

This is the earliest self-portrait Rembrandt is known to have made, painted around 1628 when he was 22 and still an unknown working in his hometown of Leiden. He wasn't posing for posterity so much as using his own face to study the thing he was obsessed with, how light falls. A single beam catches his cheek and neck while the rest of his face drops back into shadow, so you have to strain to read him. The curls give the game away: look closely and you can see where he took the blunt wooden end of his brush and scratched the hair straight into the wet paint.