Autorretrato

Rembrandt painted himself here in 1652, at 46, standing with his hands on his hips and his weight settled back, dressed not in finery but in a plain brown painter's smock. He looks squarely out, sure of himself. The confidence is worth noting, because the ground was already shifting under him. He had been living beyond his means for years in a grand house in Amsterdam, and within four years the debts would force him to sell the house and its contents at auction and file for insolvency. None of that anxiety shows here. He gives himself the solid, planted pose of a man of standing, one of some 40 painted self-portraits he left across his life, a running record of his own face.