Portrait d'un amiral étranger

Rembrandt signed and dated this portrait in 1658, one of the worst years of his life. Two years earlier he had been declared insolvent, and through the late 1650s the courts sold off his grand house on the Breestraat and the collection of art and curiosities he had spent a fortune assembling. In the middle of that ruin he painted this man standing with one fist planted on his hip, his cloak thrown back, entirely sure of himself. For a long time he was called a foreign admiral, though nobody knows who he actually was. The confidence is all in the handling, thick worked paint catching the light along the sleeve and collar, done by a painter who had just lost almost everything he owned.