The Risen Christ

By 1661 Rembrandt legally owned nothing. His house and goods had been auctioned five years earlier to pay his creditors, and to keep working he had been turned into a salaried employee of a small art-dealing firm set up in the names of his partner Hendrickje Stoffels and his son Titus, so that nothing he earned could be seized. That is the year of this figure. There is no wound on display, no banner, no soldiers falling back, only a man standing and looking straight out, lit by a halo so faint it is easy to miss. In the 1650s Rembrandt had painted a set of small studies of Christ's head, apparently from a young Jewish man from his own quarter of Amsterdam, and that particular face is the one standing here. Around the same time the city handed him an enormous canvas for its new town hall, and took it down again within months of hanging it.