Titus Reading (study in direct and reflected light)

In 1656 Rembrandt was declared insolvent. Officials came to his house on the Breestraat in Amsterdam and made an inventory of everything he owned so it could be auctioned to pay his debts. Around that same time he painted this, his son Titus, about 15, lost in a book. Titus was the only one of his children with his first wife Saskia to survive to adulthood, and within a few years the boy would help run a business set up partly to shield his father's earnings from creditors. None of that trouble shows here. Rembrandt gives him a warm, raking light that catches the page, the hand and the down on his cheek, and lets the rest of the room fall into shadow.