Self-Portrait

Nothing hidden about age

The Metropolitan Museum of Art says Rembrandt was unsparing with the signs of age in his own face. He built up the paint in high ridges for his furrowed brow, the heavy pouches under his eyes and his double chin.

Walter Liedtke, a curator at the Met, told CBS News in 2007 that the picture was made by looking in a mirror for a very long time. In the painting you can see every furrow in the brow and the aging in the eyes, Liedtke said.

The Met's catalogue calls the face remarkable for its quality and candor, and says it is the best-preserved part of the painting.

How the paint was put on

A synthetic varnish was removed from the painting in recent years. The Met says this made Rembrandt's working method easier to see. In the curls at the left, he turned his brush around and scratched into the paint with the handle end.

Rembrandt first painted a smaller cap and then painted the wide hat over it. The hat now looks flat, but the Met says that is because the black paint has darkened with age. Special images called autoradiographs, made by turning the paint briefly and harmlessly radioactive, still show folds in the hat.

The brown gown looks sketchy today, with the gray first coat of the canvas showing through in places. The Met's catalogue warns that this is partly damage. Heavy cleaning in the past wore away some of the brown paint. Rembrandt did paint his work clothes broadly, but the gown once looked fuller and rounder.

One of about forty painted self-portraits

Rembrandt painted himself all his life. The Met counts roughly forty painted self-portraits that survive. English Heritage counts about eighty self-portraits in all when etchings and drawings are included.

The Met's catalogue traces a line of portraits in which he shows himself plainly as a working painter. The first is the standing self-portrait of 1652 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The closest to this one are a small self-portrait in Vienna, one in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and one dated 1659 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

He painted another self-portrait in the same year, 1660: the Self-Portrait at the Easel now in the Louvre in Paris. There he shows himself at work with his palette and brushes.

Rembrandt in 1660

The years before 1660 had been hard for Rembrandt. The Rijksmuseum says that after money troubles in the 1650s he moved to a rented house on the Rozengracht in Amsterdam, and the city's rich families came to him less often.

CBS News pointed out that he painted this portrait nine years before he died. Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in 1669.

From Paris to New York

The first owner the Met lists is the duc de Valentinois in Paris. The painting then went to England. Admiral William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, owned it until he died in 1825, and it was sold at Christie's in London in 1826 for £299.

Alexander Baring, later 1st Baron Ashburton, bought it at that sale. The portrait stayed with the Barons Ashburton in London until about 1907.

The Paris dealer Sedelmeyer had it next, and in 1909 sold it to the New York collector Benjamin Altman. Altman died in 1913 and left it to the Met in his will.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, accession number 14.40.618. The Met's record lists it in Gallery 616, the same room as Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.

The Met's record says the terms under which the museum received the painting do not allow it to be lent, so it stays in New York.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Rembrandt van Rijn painted his own face at 54 with thick paint and no flattery. Up close you can see the ridges of paint on his forehead, the curls he scratched with the handle of his brush, the dark hat that has lost its folds, and the signature fading at the edge.