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
