Retrato de um Homem

We don't know who this man is, and neither does the museum after long study. Rembrandt painted him in Amsterdam in the 1650s, the decade his own fortunes were collapsing. He had overspent badly on his grand house and his art collection, and by 1656 he would file for insolvency and watch his possessions inventoried and auctioned off. None of that shows in the sitter, a solid, self-contained man emerging from the brown dark that Rembrandt now let swallow almost everything but the face and hands. The surface is worn today, the hat and body rubbed thin by centuries of cleaning, so it is the head that carries the picture, lit and watchful against the shadow.