Titus as a Monk

By 1660 Rembrandt had lost almost everything. He had gone bankrupt, his house and his collection had been sold at auction, and he was living in a rented place on the edge of Amsterdam. Around this time he painted his teenage son Titus in the brown habit of a Franciscan monk, an order sworn to poverty and humility. The boy looks down, his thin face caught in warm light against a dark, roughly brushed robe, and Rembrandt saves all his attention for that face. There is no evidence Titus ever entered a monastery. The habit is a costume, the kind of dressing-up Rembrandt loved. Titus would die young, at 26, in 1668, only a year before his father, which is part of why this quiet portrait of him has the weight it does.