Rembrandt, Self portrait

In this etching we find Rembrandt’s head alongside the figure of a beggar with another elderly figure and a child. The juxtaposition of these seemingly unrelated elements points to the rough and experimental nature of these designs. The etchings are nevertheless fairly accomplished for a sketch, Rembrandt's characteristic depth and shading are added in the typical cross-hatching style and there is a generous amount of detail on the facial features. The artist’s expression is ambiguous—is Rembrandt’s air one of seriousness? Irony? Melancholy? In some sense such questions are superfluous; we will never know the expression that the artist was trying to capture, if indeed he was trying to capture an expression at all. Nevertheless, the issue of the etching’s indeterminacy remains. The restlessness of the composition, the probing nature of the artist’s rendition of his own face, as well as the combination with different subject matter, all point to an essential fluidity in the approach to self-portraiture. Etchings such as this self-portrait are not just a way of recording Rembrandt’s passage through time, they are also important ways of testing out ideas on the page and of probing the confines of both his chosen genre and medium.