Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1658 is his largest and his most imposing

The trader had his sales pitch ready. ‘I have been presenting it to me,’ wrote Charles Carstairs, head of the Knoedler firm in London, ‘in your museum ever since I started negotiating it four months ago. It is the greatest portrait in existence… a portrait of Rembrandt himself. It is powerful, grand and monumental. If you could only see the painting hanging over your fireplace, dominating the whole room, the way you dominate everyone you come into contact with…’

This was in November 1906. The ‘you’ addressed was American steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. He agreed. The Rembrandt came to his city palace on 5th Avenue in New York, where it indeed commanded all the attention in the West Gallery for a long time. It now hangs temporarily in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in an exhibition with loans from the newly renovated Frick Collection: Manhattan Masters.

It is Rembrandt’s largest self-portrait, and also his most impressive. It shows the painter at age, all stubby nose and drooping cheek pouches. He sits. His arms are relaxed on the wooden chair backs. In his right hand he has a rattan stick. He wears a cloak over a work coat over an undershirt, with a red belt around the waist with a pomegranate at the end.

This is not the cloth that 17th-century painters usually wore during working hours. No 17th-century man wore such clothes. It was the wardrobe with which recognized masters such as Lucas van Leyden garnered approving nods from the style police a century earlier. Rembrandt presented himself with it as their rightful successor: ‘every inch a king’, as Abraham Bredius, former director of the Mauritshuis, once wrote.

52 was Rembrandt when he painted it. Life had taken a lot from him: his wife, his property, his reputation. He had filed for bankruptcy two years earlier. Now, in 1658, his house and contents had been auctioned and the painter himself had moved to the shabby Rozengracht. With such knowledge you will look differently at the man in the portrait. He automatically receives something from a survivor, someone who is still standing despite all setbacks. Rembrandt lost a lot, but not his hands. He could still paint. His zest for work and ambition had by no means evaporated through all the trials. The Jewish Bride The Samplers and The Return of the Prodigal Son he still had to paint when the self-portrait was completed.

Rembrandt already had dozens of self-portraits to his name. At least a dozen more would follow. That is a lot more self-portraits than his famous contemporaries made. Van Hals, for example, we know of only one self-portrait. We don’t even know any of Vermeer. Why not them, and Rembrandt? Self-analysis will not have been the reason. Nor was Rembrandt at this stage of his career out to study what a particular expression looked like.

No, he did it for the glory. With this self-portrait, a potential customer bought a Rembrandt twice: once as an elderly master, once as an ageless masterpiece.

We don’t need to argue that mastery again here. The bloody realism, the crispy impasto technique: you know by now why the man was our number one. The machinery only faltered at the hands, something you often see with Rembrandt. The right hand is actually more glove than hand. These hands, by the way, are a mystery in themselves. How did Rembrandt paint them at rest, while at the same time he needed them to paint? By imprinting them in his memory in front of the mirror, perhaps? By calling in Titus and having him pose as a hand model?