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Self-Portrait

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) · 1660

One of about eighty, painted after everything had gone wrong.

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) · 1660

Self-Portrait

One of about eighty, painted after everything had gone wrong.

01Where it came from

Rembrandt painted himself for forty years, in something like eighty pictures and prints. This one is from 1660, four years after he was declared insolvent and his collection was sold off to pay creditors.

The handling is loose to the point of roughness up close, and it resolves at a distance into a face that is unmistakably paying attention to you.

◆What it is made of

Self-Portrait, the painting itself.
The paint. The only evidence there is.
The depth the model inferred: pale is near, dark is far.
The guess. Pale is near, dark is far. Nobody measured any of it.
The reconstructed layer that sits behind the painting.
Behind it. Grown inward from the edges, and seen only where something moves off it.

02What the model made of it

Faces are what these models are best at, having seen more of them than of anything else, and the skull that comes back here is convincing enough to be worth distrusting. It is a good guess about a particular head, arrived at by a system that has never seen this one.

03Why this one move

He painted himself looking straight out, roughly eighty times across forty years, and every one of them holds your eye. Step to the side and you find out how much of that was aimed at exactly one spot on the floor.

04Worth looking at

Walk around him and find the angle where he stops looking at you. He held that gaze through bankruptcy, the sale of everything he owned, and forty years of painting his own face. It gives out at about thirty degrees.