Autoritratto

Rembrandt painted this at 51, in 1657, just as his finances collapsed. The year before, he had filed for insolvency, and over the next two years the courts sold off his grand house on the Breestraat in Amsterdam and the crowded collection of art and curiosities he had never stopped buying. None of that ruin is described in the picture. He simply faces us out of a warm brown dark, the light finding the lined forehead and the tired, steady eyes, the paint worked thick and rough where it catches the skin. He would go on making these unsparing self-portraits to the end of his life, more than 40 of them across the years.