Un moine franciscain

Rembrandt painted this monk in Amsterdam around 1655, and it is a slightly odd subject for him. He was a Protestant in a city where Catholic worship was officially forbidden, yet he returned to Franciscan friars several times in these years. He did not have to look far. Two Franciscan churches stood on his own street, quietly tolerated. The man wears the plain brown habit of an order founded on poverty and prayer, his eyes lowered, and he may be a real friar or simply a model dressed for the part. The timing is worth knowing. Within a year Rembrandt himself was declared bankrupt and had to sell almost everything he owned, and a life built around owning little may have spoken to him just then.