Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’, 1653, Drypoint on laid paper, third state (of five), Plate: 387 × 455 mm; Sheet: 396 × 465 mm, Christie’s, Old Masters Sale, London, 7 December 2023
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’, 1653, Drypoint on laid paper, third state (of five), Plate: 387 × 455 mm; Sheet: 396 × 465 mm, Christie’s, Old Masters Sale, London, 7 December 2023
Rembrandt’s Three Crosses stands among the most ambitious and technically daring achievements of his graphic work. Executed entirely in drypoint—a medium that produces a velvety, luminous line but quickly deteriorates under pressure—it was limited to a small number of impressions, perhaps no more than seventy-five before the plate wore down. Each surviving state records the artist’s continual rethinking of composition, meaning, and theological emphasis, making the print a rare visual document of artistic process.
Five states of the plate are known. The first two, unsigned, remain sketch-like and provisional, while the third—the present example—marks Rembrandt’s first considered completion. Around twenty-two impressions of this state are recorded. Here he concentrates light at the centre of the sheet, drawing the eye to Christ crucified, while surrounding the central event with a dense crowd in varied attitudes of alarm, pity, and indifference. The formal language of Netherlandish narrative tradition is clear: figures advance in rhythmic clusters across the picture plane, unfolding the Passion almost as a continuous sequence of episodes, comparable to Renaissance engravings by Dürer or Lucas van Leyden. The enclosing darkness at the margins works to contract the space, intensifying the viewer’s focus upon the intersection of Christ’s body and the vertical beam.
Later states profoundly alter this vision. In the fourth and fifth, produced several years afterwards, Rembrandt stripped away peripheral incident, dissolved the radiance of divine illumination, and allowed a heavy pall of shadow to engulf the scene. The emphasis shifted from a multi-scenic narrative of Calvary to an elemental meditation on Christ alone, suspended in darkness at the point of death. These revisions mark not only a technical experiment in drypoint but also a theological deepening, as the imagery moves from outward spectacle to inward reflection.
The Three Crosses gains further resonance when set beside Rembrandt’s other large-scale Passion prints of the 1650s, such as The Entombment and Christ Presented to the People (Ecce Homo). Each of these compositions, treated through successive reworkings of a single plate, unfolds as a meditation in stages: from populous, detailed evocations of the biblical drama to pared-down visions in which the mystery of redemption is conveyed through shadow, emptiness, and silence. Together, they form not a conventional Passion cycle in the medieval sense but a personal exploration of Christ’s suffering, in which the very act of re-engraving and altering becomes a metaphor for spiritual searching.
The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress, 1644, Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 31.8 cm, Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Summer Sale 2023
The Monogrammist IS (active 1632–1658), Portrait of an Old Lady, bust-length, wearing a fur coat and a blue and golden headdress, 1644. Oil on canvas, 38.4 × 31.8 cm. Signed and dated centre right: 1644 / IS. Sotheby’s, London, Old Masters Summer Sale 2023
This painting forms part of the small and distinctive group of works signed with the initials IS. The identity of the Monogrammist remains unknown, but scholars have long debated his origins, with proposals ranging from the eastern German lands to East Prussia. His oeuvre suggests an artist trained within the orbit of Dutch portraiture, possibly with direct exposure to Rembrandt or his early pupils. While no documentary evidence confirms an apprenticeship, the repeated engagement with Rembrandt’s early tronie types—elderly sitters in fur-trimmed coats and elaborate headgear—points to a painter who had studied such works closely, whether in Leiden or through their rapid dissemination on the art market.
The present portrait exemplifies that approach. The sitter, shown bust-length, gazes out with a grave expression, her lined face framed by a blue and gold embroidered headdress and the thick folds of a fur collar. The execution is precise, the brushwork restrained, and the colour range limited but effective, creating an image at once austere and richly textured. Although it takes the form of a portrait, the absence of personal attributes or inscription suggests that it is better understood as a tronie, a study of age and character.
Comparable examples by IS, including the Portrait of a Man with a Fur Collar (1632) and the Portrait of an Old Man in Schwerin, confirm a pattern of repeated types and compositional formulae. This consistency has led to speculation that the artist may have operated in a workshop context, or sought to meet market demand for Rembrandt-inspired imagery, producing works that straddled the boundary between portrait and study.
The activities of Hanseatic merchants and the lively Dutch–German art trade of the mid-seventeenth century provide a plausible context for the dissemination of such pictures. Works by Rembrandt and his circle were collected, copied, and adapted across the Baltic and German-speaking lands, their imagery often reshaped to suit regional tastes. Within this framework, the Monogrammist IS stands as a revealing figure: anonymous yet distinctive, rooted in Rembrandt’s innovations but transmitting them into new cultural settings.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Portrait of Aechje Claesdr, 1634, Oil on Baltic oak, 71.1 × 55.9 cm, The National Gallery, London
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Portrait of Aechje Claesdr, 1634, Oil on Baltic oak, 71.1 × 55.9 cm, The National Gallery, London
This portrait, painted when Rembrandt was only twenty-eight, depicts Aechje Claesdr, a wealthy widow from Rotterdam connected with the Remonstrant community. She had been married to Dirck Jansz van Herlaer, a prosperous merchant, who died in 1607. Thereafter she became known both for her piety and for her substantial charitable gifts, particularly to Remonstrant institutions such as the Orphanage. In 1634, the same year as this portrait, she endowed the Remonstrant Orphanage in Rotterdam with a considerable bequest, and the painting was most likely commissioned in connection with that act of benefaction.
Rembrandt’s treatment combines unflinching naturalism with a sense of moral gravity. The textures of skin, linen, and fur are rendered through dense, loaded brushwork with heavy use of lead white and earth pigments, marking a departure from the smoother surface effects of his earlier Leiden years. The face, deeply lined and attentive, conveys the burdens of age and hardship, but also dignity and steadfastness. Her attire is sober and deliberately old-fashioned, emphasising her seriousness and continuity with an earlier generation, and reflecting Remonstrant values of modesty and constancy in the face of persecution.
The Remonstrants, who opposed strict Calvinist orthodoxy after the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619), were heavily suppressed and often suspected of political disloyalty. Aechje’s husband and children had suffered in these conflicts, and her own fortunes were marked by the tension between prosperity and religious marginalisation. The portrait thus stands as both likeness and testimony: it records her physical presence and at the same time memorialises her courage in sustaining a dissenting community.
Although later enclosed in a heavy nineteenth-century plaster frame, which dulls its impact, the painting remains a key example of Rembrandt’s early Amsterdam portraits. It shows his ability to combine social portraiture with historical resonance, turning the image of a Rotterdam widow into a meditation on endurance, belief, and the lived experience of religious division in the Dutch Republic.
Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), ‘A Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass (probably a Self-Portrait),’ 1654. Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 61.5 cm. The National Gallery, London
Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), ‘A Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass (probably a Self-Portrait),’ 1654. Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 61.5 cm. The National Gallery, London
Carel Fabritius’s life and career were cut short in the Delft gunpowder explosion of 12 October 1654, when a munitions store detonated, destroying a quarter of the city. He was killed in his early thirties along with his workshop and much of his work. Fewer than fifteen paintings are now attributed to him, yet they show a painter of exceptional invention who stood apart from his teacher Rembrandt.
This portrait, painted in his final year, is widely accepted as a self-image. Fabritius presents himself in a fur cap and cuirass, adopting the conventions of Renaissance portraiture rather than recording his everyday appearance. The martial costume asserts presence and gravity, and situates the painter within a tradition of intellectual self-fashioning rather than military reality.
The same features appear in two earlier likenesses, one in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and one in Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, both painted in the mid-1640s when Fabritius was working in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam studio. Those pictures reveal his early adherence to the deep shadows and massing of form characteristic of Rembrandt. After leaving Amsterdam following the death of his first wife in 1643, Fabritius settled in Delft in 1650. There he developed a markedly different style, favouring clarity of light, atmospheric recession, and subtle shifts of paint handling—qualities that distinguished him from Rembrandt and influenced Delft painters such as Johannes Vermeer.
The Young Man in a Fur Cap and a Cuirass belongs to that final Delft period. Its theatrical costume, clear illumination, and carefully judged surface effects embody Fabritius’s independence from the Rembrandt school and his ambition to position himself within a broader European pictorial tradition. It is also one of the few works to survive the disaster that ended his life, giving it an added historical weight as a rare witness to the career of a painter who might otherwise have altered the course of Dutch art more profoundly.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or/with his Studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660, Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm, The National Gallery, London
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or with/his studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660. Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
In the summer of 1654, Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) was summoned three times before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. She had been living with Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn outside marriage, and she was pregnant. The council admonished her for having, in its recorded phrase, committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter. She was barred from the Lord’s Supper. Their daughter Cornelia was baptised on 30 October that year. Hendrickje never married Rembrandt, almost certainly because the terms of his first wife Saskia van Uylenburgh’s (1612–1642) will would have cost him the income from her estate: the arrangement was financially rational, socially devastating, and it placed Hendrickje permanently outside the bounds of respectability in Reformed Amsterdam.
It is against this domestic reality that a small group of half-length female figures emerged from Rembrandt’s studio during the 1650s, paintings that resist every comfortable classification. They are not conventional portraits. The women wear elaborate costumes that belong to no particular time or place, draped in furs, pearls, and wraps that evoke biblical or classical heroines without committing to any single narrative. The term most commonly applied to them is tronie, a character study or type rather than a portrait, though even that label sits uneasily with canvases that carry such evident individuality in the faces. As Dagmar Hirschfelder has demonstrated, the boundary between tronie and portrait was already a persistent problem in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and it has only become harder to draw in retrospect. A tronie, in Hirschfelder’s working definition, is a head or half-figure dressed in fantasy costume, painted after life but without the commemorative or representational function of a portrait. The difficulty is that Rembrandt’s half-length women often look as though they are commemorating someone very particular indeed.
This painting, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, belongs to that group. Comparable examples survive in the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them, only the Juno (c.1662–1665, oil on canvas, 127 × 123.8 cm, The Armand Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles) can be tied to a specific documentary context. In the summer of 1665, the Amsterdam moneylender and collector Harmen Becker (c.1617–1678) came to press Rembrandt for an outstanding debt of 537 guilders. Becker spotted the half-finished canvas in the studio and agreed to reduce the debt if the painting were completed and handed over. The rest of the group floats without documentary anchorage, their purposes and original destinations unknown.
The pictorial formula has a genealogy that extends well beyond Rembrandt’s household difficulties, and the sources feeding into it were not singular. Half-length images of women in rich dress, poised between portraiture and idealised type, had been a European preoccupation for more than a century by the time these canvases were produced. The Venetian belle donne form the most conspicuous precedent, and the one for which direct evidence of Rembrandt’s engagement is strongest. Palma Vecchio (c.1480–1528), born Jacopo Negretti in Serina Alta near Bergamo, produced dozens of fair-haired, heavy-lidded women in loose chemises whose identities are left deliberately open. His A Blonde Woman (c.1520, oil on poplar?, 77.5 × 64.1 cm, The National Gallery, London) exemplifies the type: a voluptuous figure holding spring flowers, her chemise slipping from one shoulder, her gaze sidelong, at once reticent and inviting. Are these women saints? Courtesans? Brides on the morning of their wedding? The question was part of the transaction. ‘Flora”‘was both a goddess and a common name for courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice, and the slippage between the two meanings was productive rather than accidental. Titian (c.1488/90–1576) refined the formula further. His Flora (c.1515, oil on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) inhabits exactly this territory: a young woman holding flowers, dressed in a slipping chemise, who might be goddess, bride, or simply a beautiful figure offered for the viewer’s contemplation. Rona Goffen has argued that Venetian painters exploited this categorical ambiguity as a deliberate strategy, allowing the same image to function simultaneously as devotional object, erotic invitation, and demonstration of painterly mastery.
That Rembrandt knew this tradition is not a matter of conjecture. The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, holds a Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1656–1657) whose pictorial type directly recalls Palma Vecchio’s courtesan portraits, and scientific investigation has shown that the position of the right arm originally corresponded with the Venetian model before Rembrandt progressively modified it. The Amsterdam art market of the seventeenth century was well supplied with Italian paintings, prints, and copies, and Rembrandt was an avid collector. His 1656 insolvency inventory lists Italian works and albums of prints in considerable number. The connection was not passive reception but active reworking: Rembrandt absorbed a formula designed for pleasure and turned it toward something less accommodating.
But the Venetian belle donne were far from the only current flowing into these paintings. The half-length female figure in fantasy dress had been circulating across Northern Europe for generations. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) produced serial images of Venus, Lucretia, and other classical heroines as half-length or three-quarter-length figures, nude or semi-nude, wearing nothing but elaborate hats and jewellery, their bodies rendered according to a distinctive slender Gothic ideal that stood at a considerable remove from Venetian opulence. These were commercially successful workshop products, turned out in substantial numbers from Cranach’s Wittenberg studio, and they established a Northern market appetite for the erotically charged female half-figure that predated Rembrandt by more than a century. Closer to home, the Utrecht Caravaggists of the 1610s and 1620s, particularly Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), had brought back from Rome a taste for half-length figural compositions drawn from Caravaggio and his follower Bartolomeo Manfredi (c.1582–1622): musicians, drinkers, fortune-tellers, and courtesans, strongly lit and dramatically cropped. Their half-length women were genre types rather than idealised beauties, and Hirschfelder has noted that the Utrecht masters characterised their figures through exaggerated and manipulated stereotypes rather than working naer het leeven (from life). They nonetheless contributed to the visual environment in which the Dutch tronie took shape. Behind all of these lay the influence of Northern print culture: Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), whose graphic works Rembrandt knew well, had produced fantasy heads and costumed figures that Hirschfelder and Franziska Gottwald have both identified as important precursors, the elaborate costumes in many later tronies amounting to a nostalgic reworking of Renaissance-era dress encountered through earlier engravings.
What Rembrandt did with all of this material was not aggregation but transformation. The Venetian belle donne left their women unnamed because anonymity widened the image’s range of possible uses and, by extension, its commercial appeal. Rembrandt’s studio left these women unnamed too, but the effect is different. In Venice the absence of a name invites projection and fantasy. In Amsterdam, in these canvases from the 1650s, it feels more like withholding. The viewer senses that someone specific is present but is not being introduced.
This raises the question of whether these women were painted from life, and if so, at what social cost. In sixteenth-century Venice, the use of courtesans, mistresses, and professional models for such paintings operated within a cultural framework that, while not uncontested, was broadly tolerated by patrons and public alike. The Venetian belle donne were understood to exist in a space where portraiture, allegory, and erotic display overlapped, and neither painters nor sitters appear to have suffered significant consequences for participating in it. Reformed Amsterdam in the 1650s was a different matter. The church council that censured Hendrickje in 1654 was not an abstract body enforcing distant rules; it was a local institution with the power to exclude individuals from communion and, by extension, from the social fabric of the community. For a woman already living under that censure to sit as a model for paintings that circulated publicly, paintings whose luxurious costume and ambiguous identity evoked the very traditions of courtesan portraiture from which they partly derived, would have carried a charge that no Venetian bella donna needed to bear. Svetlana Alpers, in her study of Rembrandt’s studio practice, has drawn attention to the theatrical dimension of his use of models, the way in which the studio functioned as a controlled environment where real individuals were transformed into pictorial types. But the transformation was never complete. However much the costume and pose might generalise the figure into a tronie, the face remained stubbornly particular.
Whether Hendrickje sat for this particular canvas is a question that scholarship has circled without settling. The identification rests on resemblance to other paintings where she is more confidently proposed as the model, particularly the Bathsheba at her Bath (1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris), the Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654, The National Gallery, London), and the so-called Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656, The National Gallery, London), where the sitter wears pearl earrings, a gold chain, and an almost regal bearing. The Metropolitan Museum’s Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656), perhaps intended as a generic image of a courtesan according to that institution’s own catalogue entry, complicates the picture further: if even a painting that looks like Hendrickje was conceived as a type, what does that tell us about the rest of the group? Marieke de Winkel has shown how extensively Rembrandt’s studio recycled costumes and accessories, and it is worth asking whether the continuity scholars detect between these faces reflects a single sitter or a well-practised studio habit of producing a recognisable type. The desire to name Hendrickje in these paintings may say as much about the modern viewer’s appetite for biographical narrative as it does about what was actually happening on the Breestraat.
The attribution of the painting itself remains contested, and the unevenness of the handling is the principal reason. The head is modelled with a sensitivity and directness characteristic of Rembrandt’s own probing brushwork, while passages elsewhere (particularly in the drapery) are more mechanical, suggesting the participation of studio assistants. This division of labour was standard practice in the 1650s. Pupils and assistants produced works that the master might correct, retouch, or leave partly unresolved, and the resulting canvases occupy an uncomfortable zone between autograph and workshop production.
The dating of this group is further complicated by the crisis of 1656. In July of that year, Rembrandt applied for cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency under the Amsterdam Civil Ordinance of 1643 that allowed a debtor to surrender his goods to the municipal authorities for sale in order to satisfy creditors. The contents of his house and studio on the Breestraat were inventoried and subsequently dispersed at public auction; Rembrandt, Hendrickje, and his son Titus (1641–1668) moved across the city to more modest quarters on the Rozengracht. To circumvent the requirement that future earnings be paid to creditors, Hendrickje and Titus formed a commercial partnership in which Rembrandt was nominally their employee, receiving only enough to cover his basic necessities. Whether this painting predates or follows that collapse remains an open question. The inventory, drawn up by the city’s commissioners, offers a snapshot of what remained, but it cannot account for what had already left the studio through sale, gift, or other means.
What remains, stripped of the questions that encircle it, is a painting that holds something back. The woman’s expression is composed but not blank, her costume rich but not showy, her pose dignified but carrying none of the performative warmth that marks the Venetian prototypes or the dramatic cropping of the Utrecht Caravaggists. If Palma Vecchio and Titian presented their half-length women as objects of aesthetic pleasure, images that asked to be enjoyed, and if Cranach turned the female body into a vehicle for sly eroticism dressed up as classical learning, Rembrandt (or whoever completed this canvas) seems less concerned with offering anything at all. The painting asks to be looked at, certainly. But it does not flatter the act of looking, and it does not explain itself. Whether that reticence belongs to the painter, to the sitter, or to the particular conditions under which a woman in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam might find herself painted but not named, is a question the canvas declines to answer.
References
Alpers, S. (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bruyn, J. et al. (eds.) (1982–1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vols. I–III. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project
De Winkel, M. (2004) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Goffen, R. (1997) Titian’s Women. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Gottwald, F. (2011) Das Tronie: Muster, Studie, Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu Rembrandt [The Tronie: Pattern, Study, Masterwork. The Genesis of a Genre of Painting from the Fifteenth Century to Rembrandt]. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag
Gould, C. (1987) National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools. London: National Gallery Publications
Hirschfelder, D. (2008) Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts [Tronie and Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Painting]. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag
Maclaren, N. and Brown, C. (1991) National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600–1900. 2nd edn. 2 vols. London: National Gallery Publications
Postma, H.J. (1988) ‘De Amsterdamse verzamelaar Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): Nieuwe gegevens over een geldschieter van Rembrandt’ [‘The Amsterdam Collector Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): New Data on a Moneylender to Rembrandt’], Oud-Holland, 102, pp. 1–21.Available at, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42717486 (Accessed 23 July 2023)
Rylands, P. (1992) Palma Vecchio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (1997) Rembrandt: The Painter at Work. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2005) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. IV: Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt or circle of Rembrandt, Half figure of a woman with a white wrap, 1654-1656. RKDimages, image no. 41279. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/41279 (Accessed: 12 July 2023)
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Self Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640. Oil on canvas, 91 × 75 cm. The National Gallery, London
In seventeenth-century Amsterdam the art market was awash with antiquities, engravings, Renaissance paintings, and exotic curiosities. Ships brought treasures from Venice, Antwerp, and beyond, and collections changed hands at auction with remarkable frequency. For a painter such as Rembrandt, who in the late 1630s had secured a position among the city’s leading masters, there was no need to travel to Italy: the legacy of the Renaissance was on his doorstep. He was an eager participant in this market, building his own collection of paintings, prints, and unusual objects, and closely following the arrival of great works in Amsterdam. The dispersal of Lucas van Uffelen’s collection in 1639, which included masterpieces by Raphael and Titian, offered him the opportunity to study such models directly and to absorb their authority into his own art.
The Self Portrait at the Age of 34, painted the following year, is the most deliberate statement of this engagement. Dressed in sixteenth-century costume, with heavy folds of rich fabric and the glint of gold thread, Rembrandt casts himself in the lineage of Venetian and Roman portraiture. His pose echoes Raphael’s Baldassare Castiglione and Titian’s Gerolamo Barbarigo, both recently in Amsterdam and widely admired. The costume is not a theatrical whim but part of a cultivated language of self-fashioning, drawing upon the prestige of earlier generations and their association with poetry, diplomacy, and intellectual authority.
Yet while the structure is borrowed, the character is his own. Rembrandt’s gaze is unflinching, his modelling of flesh and fabric executed with a solidity and depth absent from his Italian models. The portrait is at once homage and assertion, a way of situating himself not only as the heir to Renaissance traditions but as their living continuation in the Dutch Republic.
The work was painted during a period of professional success and personal tragedy. By 1640 he had lost three of his children with Saskia van Uylenburgh, his wealthy Frisian wife. Their only surviving son, Titus, would be born the next year, but Saskia herself would die in 1642, leaving Rembrandt a widower at the age of thirty-six. In retrospect the faint melancholy discernible in this portrait seems prophetic, an undertone beneath the confident pose.
At the time, however, Rembrandt stood at the height of his career, living in a grand house, surrounded by art and rare objects, engaged in a vibrant market where the legacies of the past were constantly renewed. This painting crystallises that moment: a Dutch artist consciously fashioning himself through the splendour of Renaissance portraiture, yet speaking with a voice entirely his own.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
In November 1655, a fourteen-year-old boy in Amsterdam sat down to make a will. The boy was Titus van Rijn (1641–1668), and the will named his father, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), as sole heir, a legal manoeuvre designed to shield what remained of the family’s assets from the painter’s creditors (Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 68–69). It was an act that no child should have needed to perform. What kind of adolescence produces a testamentary document before a first commission, a first love, or a first independent thought? Titus was not yet fifteen. Within months, in July 1656, Rembrandt would apply for cessio bonorum, the formal surrender of goods to the municipal authorities, and the household on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat would begin its slow dismantlement. It is somewhere in the wake of that collapse, around 1657, that Rembrandt painted this portrait.
The painting belongs to a concentrated period in which Rembrandt, stripped of legal competence over his own affairs, could no longer sell his own work. By 1660, Titus and Rembrandt’s companion Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) would establish a formal company dealing in paintings, prints and curiosities, hiring Rembrandt as their employee. The arrangement was a legal fiction, but an effective one: it allowed the painter to continue working while his earnings were insulated from further claims. At the time this portrait was made, then, Titus was already something more than a sitter. He was the person on whom the practical survival of the household depended, a teenager carrying obligations that would have been heavy for a grown man.
Rembrandt dresses him in a sixteenth-century Venetian costume, complete with a gold chain and a soft red beret from which loose curls spill forward. The costume was drawn from the painter’s own collection of studio props, which the 1656 inventory had meticulously catalogued before it was all sold off. There is something pointed, perhaps even defiant, about cloaking one’s near-penniless son in the garments of a wealthy merchant. Was this aspiration, irony, or simply the habitual reach of a painter who had always thought in terms of borrowed roles? The question hangs over the image without resolution.
The face, however, refuses all theatre. Lit from the left, with strong shadow falling across the right side and pooling beneath the brim of the beret, Titus looks out with an expression that resists easy paraphrase. It is not quite sadness, not quite composure, not quite absence. The gaze is steady but slightly lowered, and the paint itself, applied in thin, dragged strokes across the forehead and thicker impasto along the bridge of the nose, seems to hesitate between precision and vulnerability. Rembrandt restricts himself to a narrow range of browns, ochres and dark reds, so that the warm accents in the hair, lips and beret are the only notes of colour in a field of near-monochrome shadow. Lelia Packer, Curator of Dutch and Pre-1600 Paintings at the Wallace Collection, has drawn attention to the economy of means here, noting how a single stroke of the brush along the right shoulder is sufficient to define the entire fall of the fabric (Packer, 2019).
It is worth pausing over the category of image this represents, because it does not quite settle into any one genre. Rembrandt painted Titus repeatedly in the 1650s and 1660s, and across these likenesses the boy appears variously as himself, as a figure type, and as something closer to what the Dutch would have recognised as a tronie, a character study in which individual likeness serves a broader pictorial purpose. The earlier Titus at His Desk (1655, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) shows a younger, softer child absorbed in reading; the later Titus as a Monk (1660, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) places him in a Franciscan habit, where the identification as Titus has itself been questioned. The Wallace Collection portrait sits between these poles. The Venetian costume distances the image from straightforward portraiture, yet the face is so particular, so clearly observed, that the viewer cannot treat it as a stock figure. Does it matter whether Rembrandt intended this as a portrait for the market or as a private record? The two categories were never as separate in seventeenth-century Amsterdam as modern viewers tend to assume, and Rembrandt, more than most, moved freely across that boundary.
The family history shadowing the picture is well known but still difficult to absorb. Titus was the only surviving child of Rembrandt’s marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642), whose three previous children had all died in infancy. Saskia herself died in 1642, barely a year after Titus’s birth, leaving a will that granted Rembrandt the usufruct of her estate on condition that he did not remarry (Schwartz, 2006, p. 188). This stipulation shaped the remainder of Rembrandt’s domestic life: his relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, which produced a daughter, Cornelia (b. 1654), could never be formalised without forfeiting Titus’s inheritance. Hendrickje died in 1663. Titus himself married Magdalena van Loo (1641–1669) in February 1668 but died that September, probably of plague, before the birth of his daughter, Titia, in March 1669. Rembrandt followed his son to the grave on 4 October 1669 and was buried in the Westerkerk.
The painting’s own later history carries a quieter but instructive drama. It was acquired by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870), at the sale of the collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands in The Hague in 1850, for 6,000 florins. When the Wallace Collection was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897, twelve paintings were accepted as autograph Rembrandts. Over the following century, one after another fell to connoisseurial scrutiny. By 1986, as the Rembrandt Research Project continued its rigorous programme of disattribution, this portrait of Titus was the only painting in the collection to have retained an uncontested attribution to Rembrandt himself (Van de Wetering, 2014). Christopher Brown subsequently restored several other works to Rembrandt’s hand, including the Self-Portrait in a Black Cap (c.1637), which now hangs opposite the Titus in the same first-floor gallery, creating a silent dialogue between father and son across the room. But the fact remains that for a decade, this single painting was the only genuine Rembrandt the Wallace Collection could claim.
Today the canvas sits inside a heavy nineteenth-century frame whose ornamental excess sits uneasily against the restraint of the image it contains. The gilded scrollwork and raised moulding belong to a different sensibility altogether, one that wanted old master paintings to look expensive. Whether the Wallace Collection would ever consider reframing is another question, but the contrast is instructive: it shows how thoroughly later taste can misread the intentions of a painting that works precisely through reduction, through the refusal of decorative surplus.
What remains, when the frame and the biography and the attribution history are set aside, is a picture of a boy who had no business looking this old. Rembrandt does not sentimentalise him and does not heroicise him. He simply paints what is there: a face shaped by circumstance, lit by a narrow fall of light, and held in a silence that the viewer is left to interpret for themselves.
References
Crenshaw, P. (2006) Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art Market in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwartz, G. (2006) Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames & Hudson
Strauss, W. and Van der Meulen, M. (eds.) (1979) The Rembrandt Documents. New York: Abaris Books
Van de Wetering, E. (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited – A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt , Portrait of Titus, c. 1657. RKDimages, image no. 232768. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/232768 (Accessed: 26 June 2023)
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
In the summer of 1638, Rembrandt was living with his wife Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642) in rented rooms on the Binnen Amstel in Amsterdam, in a house known locally as the Suikerbackerij, the Confectionery. By then he was the most sought-after painter in the city, managing a busy workshop and negotiating the final stages of his Passion series for Stadholder Frederick Henry (1584–1647), a commission brokered by the state secretary and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and the most prestigious that the young painter had yet received. On 22 July 1638, Saskia gave birth to a daughter christened Cornelia, named for Rembrandt’s mother. Three weeks later, on 13 August, the infant was buried. She was their second child to die: their firstborn son Rumbartus, baptised in December 1635, had survived barely two months. A second daughter, also named Cornelia, born in July 1640, would likewise live only days. Somewhere in the midst of this year of professional triumph and private grief, Rembrandt signed and dated, on the face of the tomb itself, a small panel painting of the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden.
The painting takes its subject from John 20:11–18, the most circumstantial of the gospel accounts of the events at the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene has stayed behind alone after Peter and the beloved disciple have departed. Weeping, she stoops to look inside the sepulchre and sees two angels seated where the body had lain. She turns, and finds a man standing behind her whom she takes to be the gardener. ‘Sir,’ she says, ‘if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.’ He speaks a single word, her name, and she recognises him. Most painters who treated this episode chose the moment that follows: the Noli me tangere, the risen Christ’s command to Mary not to touch him, which offered a dramatic exchange of gestures and a visually legible confrontation between sacred and human bodies. Rembrandt does something different, and arguably more difficult. He pauses the narrative a beat earlier, at the instant before recognition breaks through. Mary kneels, twisting her body towards a figure she has not yet understood, her face lit with searching expectation. The scene is held at the threshold of a disclosure that has not yet occurred, and the painting’s psychological force depends on this suspension.
Christ stands in the centre of the composition, directly aligned with the distant silhouette of a temple-like structure evoking Jerusalem, so that his partially silhouetted vertical form draws the eye upward from the dark mouth of the tomb to the first light of dawn. He is dressed as a working gardener: broad-brimmed hat, a spade in one hand, a pruning knife tucked into his belt. This iconography was not Rembrandt’s invention. The motif of Christ as gardener had circulated in northern European art since at least the early fifteenth century and had been codified in printed bibles produced in the Low Countries between 1481 and 1540, where gardening implements, a wide hat, and a city in the background were standard attributes. Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) woodcut of the Noli me tangere from the Small Passion (1509–11) shows Christ holding a hoe with a halo, while Lucas van Leyden’s (c. 1494–1533) engraving of the subject includes the gardener’s hat, the ointment jar, a tree, and a distant city. Rembrandt almost certainly owned impressions of both prints: his 1656 insolvency inventory records a substantial collection of works by Dürer and Lucas. But where these earlier images tend to present Christ in a costume that sits lightly over an already divine figure, Rembrandt takes the disguise seriously. His Christ is a sturdy man dressed for labour, his sleeves pushed to the elbow, his robe belted for movement. The shovel is not a prop; it is at the ready.
Behind Christ and Mary Magdalene stands a tree, a detail that Rembrandt inherits from earlier iconographies but that carries a particular weight in the Reformed exegetical tradition. As Bobbi Dykema has argued in her study of this painting as a Calvinist visual typology, the tree deliberately invokes the tree behind Adam and Eve in images of the Fall, casting Christ and Mary as a new Adam and a new Eve. The garden of Arimathea becomes a second Eden, and the gardener is recast as the cultivator of a restored creation. This typological layering, in which Old Testament and New Testament episodes are figured as mirroring one another, was central to Reformed preaching and to Dutch bible illustration. Whether Rembrandt consciously intended the parallel or simply absorbed it from the visual and textual culture around him is an open question, but the composition encourages the reading: the tree leans over the two figures like a silent witness, and the neatly trimmed box hedge in the foreground establishes the setting as a tended, purposeful garden rather than a wilderness.
Rembrandt enriches the composition with secondary episodes drawn from the synoptic gospels rather than from John alone. Two angels keep vigil at the empty tomb, their pale forms barely distinguishable from the rock. On the left, two women descend a flight of steps, a detail that corresponds to the three Marys mentioned in Mark and Luke rather than to John’s account, which names only Mary Magdalene. Their presence is a quiet liberty, a compression of separate gospel traditions into a single pictorial field. Beyond them, in the dim half-light, the apostles are already departing, their silhouettes receding towards the city. The sky above flushes with the first light of dawn, and this opalescent radiance picks out, selectively, the towers of the Temple of Jerusalem, the upper half of Christ’s figure, and the upturned face of the Magdalene.
The paint itself is thin, almost monochrome, as though Rembrandt were working close to the tonal register of a drawing or an etching. Colour is withheld from most of the surface and released only in the warm tones of Mary’s mantle and the cool blaze of Christ’s robe, so that light does the work of declaring significance.
The painting is one of only two occasions on which Rembrandt treated this subject. The second, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, is dated 1651 and is compositionally and tonally different: there Christ appears without the gardener’s attributes, in his burial shroud, and the mood is quieter, more intimate, less staged. The Rembrandt Research Project catalogued the Greenwich panel as no. A 124 in volume III of the Corpus (1989) and as no. 158 in volume VI (2015), confirming its autograph status. It is signed and dated, somewhat indistinctly, on the tomb at right: Rembrandt ft. 1638.
The year 1638 placed this painting at a significant junction in Rembrandt’s development. He was completing the Resurrection for the Passion series, the final work to be delivered to the Stadholder’s gallery at the Binnenhof in The Hague. In a letter to Huygens, Rembrandt had already suggested that the Ascension would ‘show to the best advantage in the gallery of His Excellency since there is a strong light there’, evidence that he was thinking carefully about how his religious paintings would function in specific settings. The Greenwich panel, by contrast, is a small, private picture, intended for close looking. Its restrained palette and intimate scale suggest a work made for domestic devotion or for a particular patron rather than for display, and the thinness of the paint, which approaches grisaille in places, gives it something of the contemplative character of Rembrandt’s etchings of biblical subjects. This was also the period in which Rembrandt was painting Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1635–38, National Gallery, London) and the Landscape with a Stone Bridge (c. 1638, Rijksmuseum), works that show him moving between dramatic spectacle and quiet observation with unusual freedom. What links them is not a single style but an attention to the fall of light, to the way illumination discovers form and gives it meaning.
The contrast between the darkness surrounding the tomb and the arriving dawn is the painting’s central organising principle, and it is at once physical and theological. In the Reformed tradition, the sunrise at Easter carried a specific typological charge: it was the dawn not merely of a new day but of a new dispensation, the visible analogue of the passage from death to life, from the old covenant to the new. Rembrandt handles this with characteristic understatement. The light does not stream from the risen body, as it does in many Italian and Flemish treatments; it enters from the left as the natural light of morning, falling equally on Christ and on Mary. There is no supernatural aureole, no emanation. The risen Christ is lit as a gardener would be lit, standing in a garden at first light, and the theological claim is embedded in the ordinary world rather than imposed upon it. Whether this reflects a specifically Calvinist sensibility, a personal temperament, or simply a painter’s instinct for the way light actually works in the early hours is one of those questions that the painting raises without resolving.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
References
Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S.H., van Thiel, P.J.J. and van de Wetering, E. (1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. III: 1635–1642. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project).
Dykema, B. (2012) ‘Woman, Why Weepest Thou? Rembrandt’s 1638 Noli me tangere as a Dutch Calvinist Visual Typology’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages through the Baroque. Leiden: Brill
Klessmann, R. (1988) ‘Rembrandts “Noli Me Tangere” — Mit den Augen eines Dichters gesehen’, Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, 27, pp. 89–100
McNamara, S. (2015) Rembrandt’s Passion Series. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Perlove, S. and Silver, L. (2009) Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, 1638. RKDimages, image no. 47566. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/47566 (Accessed: 20 June 2023).
Van de Wetering, E. (2011) ‘Rembrandt — The risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene [“Noli me tangere”]’, in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. V. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), pp. 516 ff.
Van de Wetering, E. (2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), no. 158.
Willem Drost (1633–1659), Young Woman in a Brocade Gown, c.1654, Oil on canvas, 62.4 × 49.8 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
Willem Drost (1633–1659), Young Woman in a Brocade Gown, c.1654, Oil on canvas, 62.4 × 49.8 cm, The Wallace Collection, London
Willem Drost remains one of the most intriguing figures of the Rembrandt circle, his brief life and small oeuvre clouded by misattribution and uncertainty. Born in Amsterdam in 1633, he entered Rembrandt’s studio as a teenager and absorbed the master’s dramatic use of light and shade, as well as his interest in exotic costume and historical imagination. Drost’s career, however, was cut short when he died in Venice at only twenty-five, just as his independent style was beginning to emerge. His work was long mistaken for that of Rembrandt, and several of his finest paintings entered collections under the older master’s name. Only with modern scholarship has his distinct contribution been disentangled from Rembrandt’s legacy.
The Young Woman in a Brocade Gown is a compelling example of this confusion. Attributed to Rembrandt until the nineteenth century, and even signed with his name by a later hand, it was purchased as such by the dealer Chrétien-Jean Nieuwenhuys before entering the collection of Sir Richard Wallace. The false signature was not removed until the 1970s, when Drost’s authorship was firmly established.
The painting depicts a bust-length figure in rich orientalising costume, with a heavy brocaded gown and a turban wound across her head. Such fantasies of ‘eastern’ attire, drawing on Italian precedents and contemporary interest in the Levant, were already common among Dutch and Flemish painters in the 1650s. They provided a ready vehicle for the depiction of female beauty outside the conventions of strict portraiture, blurring the lines between history painting, allegory, and genre. Rembrandt himself, along with his pupils and followers, produced many such half-length images of women in exotic dress, sometimes presented as mythological heroines or courtesans, sometimes left deliberately ambiguous.
Drost’s version is distinguished by the sensuous handling of textiles, the precise description of embroidered surfaces, and the soft modelling of flesh. It is not a portrait in the conventional sense but rather an imaginative evocation, a type designed for the open art market where collectors prized beauty and exoticism as much as narrative or moral content. In this respect it reflects both the taste of mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the painter’s skill at adapting Rembrandt’s idiom to the demands of private collectors.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Self-Portrait with Two Circles, c.1665. Oil on canvas, 114.3 cm × 94 cm, Kentwood House, London
Rembrandt painted more self-portraits than any artist before him, somewhere between forty and eighty depending on where one draws the line between a self-portrait and a tronie using the artist’s own face as a convenient model. Over a forty-year career he cast himself as soldier, burgher, man in an exotic turban, apostle Paul, the ancient painter Zeuxis. Some of these costumed performances continued into the 1660s: the Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul dates from 1661, the Self-Portrait as Zeuxis from around 1662. But the Self-Portrait with Two Circles c. 1665–69, does something different. The roles have been put down. There is no historical disguise, no borrowed identity. A painter holds his tools and looks at himself in a mirror, and that is all.
He stands in shallow space before a pale wall on which two large arcs are faintly inscribed. He wears a fur-lined tabard over a crimson doublet, a plain linen cap on his head, and holds a palette, brushes, and mahlstick in his left hand. His right hand disappears into an unresolved blur at his hip. At the extreme right edge of the canvas, a narrow vertical strip reveals the edge of a painting he is working on, turned away from the viewer. There is no signature. The face is the most worked area of the surface: built up in dense, layered strokes of ochre, grey, and warm brown, with subtle glazes around the eye sockets and sharper impasto catching the light on the nose and ear. The lower body, by contrast, remains schematic, the tabard blocked in with broad, flat passages that were clearly never brought to completion.
X-ray examination has revealed that Rembrandt substantially altered the composition during execution. In the earlier design, he was turned further to his left with his arm raised in the act of painting, tools in his right hand, faithfully copying his reversed reflection in the mirror. He then corrected for the reversal, moved the palette and brushes to his left hand, realigned his body with the picture plane, and tucked the empty right hand out of sight. In the first version, the subject was a man painting. In the second, the subject is a painter. The distinction is not trivial. Rembrandt revised the composition away from activity and towards identity, from something he was doing to something he was.
By 1665, painting was very nearly the only thing left. He had been declared insolvent in 1656, and his house on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat and his extensive collection of art, antiquities, and curiosities were sold at auction over the following years. To circumvent the legal consequences of the bankruptcy, his partner Hendrickje Stoffels and his son Titus established an art-dealing business in 1660 in which Rembrandt was technically their employee, working under their names. Hendrickje died in 1663. Titus married in February 1668 and died that September, at twenty-seven. Rembrandt survived him by just over a year, dying on 4 October 1669 and buried in an unmarked rented grave in the Westerkerk. He continued to receive significant commissions during these years, including The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis for the new Amsterdam Town Hall (1661–62) and The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662), so the story is not simply one of abandonment. But the world that had sustained him, the prosperity, the collection, the household, the people, had fallen away, and what remained was the work.
The two circles on the wall behind him have generated an extraordinary volume of interpretation for marks that may or may not carry any iconographic freight. The most persistent reading connects them to Vasari’s account of Giotto drawing a perfect circle freehand to prove his skill to a papal emissary, a story that itself echoes Pliny the Elder’s account of the contest between the ancient painters Apelles and Protogenes, in which artistic supremacy was demonstrated through the drawing of increasingly fine lines. On this reading, the circles are a late, defiant claim to mastery. Others have proposed that they represent the hemispheres of a double-hemisphere world map, a familiar furnishing in Dutch interiors, implying a claim to universality. More speculative suggestions invoke the rota Aristotelis or even kabbalistic symbolism. The most prosaic possibility is that they are compositional devices placed to balance the off-centre figure, or incidental studio marks left visible in a painting that was never resolved. Digital analysis has confirmed that the arcs are geometrically precise, almost certainly drawn with a compass rather than freehand, which at the very least complicates the Giotto interpretation in its simplest form. The circles remain genuinely opaque, and it is just impossible to know for sure what they mean, if they mean anything at all.
What is less ambiguous is what the painting says about its maker without recourse to symbolism. Rembrandt at sixty stares out, or rather stares at himself in a mirror, with an expression that resists the easy adjectives (defiant, resigned, serene) that have been applied to it. There is an alertness in the face, a professional attentiveness, that belongs to the act of painting rather than to mood. He is studying himself in order to get himself right on the canvas. The painting records that act and, by remaining unfinished, preserves it permanently in progress. Everything theatrical has been discarded. The rich costumes and historical disguises of the earlier self-portraits are gone. The tabard is working dress. The tools are held openly, as attributes. The circles, whatever they are, belong to the studio. And the gaze, which is not directed at us but at a mirror, is the gaze of a man whose relationship with his own face is entirely professional: it is the surface he is painting, nothing more and nothing less.
This is what gives the picture its particular force, and what separates it from the pathos that later centuries have projected onto it. It is tempting to read the painting as a confession of suffering, a record of endurance through loss. But the image itself does not suffer. It works. The face is the most intensely painted passage in the picture because it is the passage Rembrandt cared most about getting right, and the care is visible in every loaded stroke. The rest could wait, and in the end it waited forever. What the Self-Portrait with Two Circles finally shows is a man for whom painting was no longer a profession or a livelihood or a means of display, but the last and most durable form of being he had. Everything else could be taken away, and was. This could not.
References
Chapman, H.P. (1990) Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Alpers, S. (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bryant, J. (2003) Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Chenault Porter, J. (1988) ‘Rembrandt and His Circles: More about the Late Self-Portrait in Kenwood House’, in Fleischer, R. E. and Munshower, S. S. (eds.) The Age of Rembrandt: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 189–212
De Winkel, M. (2006) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Schama, S. (1999) Rembrandt’s Eyes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Van de Wetering, E. (2005) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. IV: Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer
