Homem com boina emplumada

This is not a portrait of anyone in particular. It belongs to a kind of picture the Dutch called a tronie, a study of a striking head in costume, and here the costume is deliberately old fashioned, a steel gorget at the throat and a soft beret with a feather, the dress of a soldier from an earlier century. Rembrandt painted it around 1659, a hard time in his life. Three years earlier he had been declared insolvent and his house and collection were sold off to pay his debts. He kept making these brooding, dimly lit figures dragged up out of the past, the light catching a cheekbone and the sheen of the metal collar. In recent years the panel has been studied under X-ray and infrared to trace how he built it up.