책 읽는 수도사

Rembrandt painted this in 1661, five years after he had been declared insolvent and forced to sell his house and his art collection at auction. He was in his mid-fifties, out of fashion, and his late works had grown quieter and more inward, fewer props, less display, faces caught in thought. Here a Franciscan friar in a brown habit bends over a sheet of paper. Almost the whole canvas is brown and shadow. The one bright thing is the page itself, which seems to hold its own light in the middle of the picture, while the friar, not posing and not preaching, simply reads. It has belonged to a Finnish state collection since the industrialist Hjalmar Linder gave his paintings away, and it remains one of the very few Rembrandts to be seen in Finland.