63세의 자화상

Rembrandt painted this in 1669, the last year of his life, one of three self-portraits he managed that year before he died in October. By then he had outlived his wife, his mistress, and his son Titus, and he had been through bankruptcy. None of that is spelled out, yet it is all in the face. He looks straight out, calm and heavy-lidded, hands loosely clasped. He was preoccupied here with the texture of his own ageing skin, and he built the sagging pouch beneath one eye and the blotches on his forehead out of thick, worked paint you can almost feel. An X-ray later showed he changed his mind as he went, painting out a brush and a maulstick that his hands had originally been holding.