San Matteo e l'angelo

Rembrandt painted this in 1661, in the last decade of his life and a few years after he had lost his house and possessions to bankruptcy. The commissions had thinned, and the pictures from these years turn inward and get rougher, built from thick, loosely worked paint. Here the evangelist Matthew pauses over his open book, pen in hand, while an angel leans in close from behind and rests a hand on his shoulder to murmur the words he should write. People often say the young angel has the face of Rembrandt's son Titus, who was around 20 then, though that remains a guess. What is certain is the tenderness of the gesture, one figure bending to speak into another's ear, the old writer's hand still holding its place on the page.