Portrait de Gérard de Lairesse

The sitter was a young painter, Gerard de Lairesse, about 24 when Rembrandt painted him around 1665. His flattened nose and heavy, swollen features come from congenital syphilis, carried from birth, though no one at the time read them that way. It was only in 1913 that a doctor looked at this face and recognised the signs of the disease. Rembrandt records it plainly, without softening and without cruelty. What makes the portrait stranger is what came afterward. De Lairesse went blind around 1690 and turned to writing about art, and in his books he dismissed the loose, thick manner of paint Rembrandt used here as looking like liquid mud on the canvas.