Autoportrait en Zeuxis riant

Rembrandt painted this near the end, around 1663, a few years after bankruptcy had cost him his house and his collection. He casts himself as Zeuxis, an ancient Greek painter who, the old story goes, laughed himself to death while painting a wrinkled old woman who had insisted on posing as the goddess of love. You can just make out her carved profile in the shadow at the far left, the thing he is laughing at. It is one of only a couple of self-portraits in which Rembrandt lets himself grin. The paint is thick and rough, scraped and dragged with the end of the brush, worked hardest around the laughing eyes and the loose skin of the throat.