The Parable of the Rich Fool

Rembrandt was about 21 and still living in his home town of Leiden when he painted this, years before Amsterdam and fame. It is a night scene lit by a single candle, its flame half-hidden behind the hand of an old man who sits hunched at a table stacked with ledgers, squinting through spectacles at a coin held up to the light. The subject is Christ's parable of the rich man who fills his barns and plans an easy future, then dies that very night. The Berlin gallery, where it hangs, prefers the plainer title The Money Changer. Rembrandt was already doing the thing he would keep doing all his life, letting one small flame pull a figure out of the dark. The old miser, people have long said, was modelled on the painter's own father.