A self-portrait etching of Rembrandt; bust length, turned three-quarters to the right. He has long unkempt hair, a beard and a moustache. He wears a plumed hat, a gorget, and a heavy cloak. Signed in the plate, lower right: Rembrandt / f. 1634. This is the second state of three, cut to an irregular oval, and it is a strong contemporary impression.

It has been questioned whether the model in this etching really is Rembrandt: while his brow is less furrowed than usual, his distinctively lugubrious features do seem to be rendered here, with the addition of a light beard to his habitual moustache. In the first state of the print the plate was larger and rectangular, and Rembrandt depicted himself standing at three-quarter length, his right hand on his hip and holding a sabre in his left. For an unknown reason he soon cut that plate down to the oval seen here, adding shading in the costume and background and re-inscribing his signature on the plate.

Rembrandt produced some thirty self-portrait etchings during the course of his career, in a variety of modes – straightforward self-portraits, studies in expression or lighting, and many in which he dressed in exotic costume. It is perhaps difficult to determine whether this last category should be considered as ‘true’ self-portraits, in the sense of self-examinations where the artist is the manifest subject, or whether Rembrandt was simply using himself as a convenient model for an imaginative character study or tronie, a well-established genre of Northern art. But in the work of Rembrandt there is no clear boundary between these, and it would seem that his inexhaustible fascination with his own appearance extended to trying out different identities, seeing whether he became a different person when in a different guise, especially that of another time or culture.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016