Autoportrait

By the mid-1640s Rembrandt was a widower. His wife Saskia had died in 1642, and the flood of grand commissions that once poured into his Amsterdam studio was thinning out. He kept painting the one model who never charged and never left, which was himself. Here he sets his face inside a painted oval, half-lit under a soft beret, the red cloak barely worked up while the eyes are finished with real care. He looks steadily out, neither posing nor performing. A century later a German princess, Caroline Louise, bought it for a small room of favourite pictures she was assembling in Karlsruhe, where it still hangs.