Autoportrait

Rembrandt was 24 in 1630 and still in Leiden, the town he was born in, sharing models and ideas with the painter Jan Lievens and producing etchings faster than paintings. That year he made a run of small etched self-portraits pulling faces, staring, scowling, mouth open. His father died that April.

This one he painted, on a sheet of copper, the same metal he was biting his etchings into. Before he began he primed the plate with white lead and laid gold leaf over the whole of it, so the thin colours sit on a reflective ground and carry more light than they otherwise would. Only five paintings on copper by him are known, and three of those have the gold underneath.

The picture is 15 centimetres tall. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm acquired it in 1956, around the Rembrandt exhibition it staged that year.