Workshop of Rembrandt, Portrait of Rembrandt as a young man, c. 1628-31

1628

Medium

Oil on canvas; a circle

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-149612

The face that stares out of the canvas is immediately familiar: with his heavily-lidded eyes, full lips, slightly bulbous nose and cloud of curly dark hair, it is the young Rembrandt van Rijn, a genius who revolutionised the art of painting in 17th Century Holland. Brilliant engraver, inspired painter of religious and mythological scenes and innovative portraitist, Rembrandt returned again and again to his own likeness as a subject, sometimes in formal attire and pose, and in other instances as a convenient model for informal experimentation. These self-portraits are among his most beloved and sought-after works, and, as a result, they were extensively copied by pupils, followers and imitators. When this Portrait of Rembrandt as a young man appeared at auction in 2019, it was obscured by a dirty varnish and laid down onto a square canvas, from which it has since been removed. Neither the cleaning nor the subsequent pigment analysis revealed any anachronisms. The face of the young Rembrandt now nearly fills the circular canvas, starkly illuminated from the upper left so that the artist’s brow and the left half of his face are deeply shadowed. Yet, while this sort of lighting study is familiar to scholars of Rembrandt self-portraits – indeed, this work relates particularly closely to two accepted early self-portraits from around the same date, the Rijksmuseum picture of circa 1628 and the Alte Pinakothek self-portrait which has been dated to 1629 – this is not a copy or version of a known self-portrait. The question of its origins is therefore an intriguing one, particularly as relatively little is known about the artist’s Leiden workshop practice at this time.