No other 17th-century artist played theself-portrait gameas extravagantly as the Dutchman Rembrandt. Spanning from his youth until just a year prior to his death, this collection gathers theentirety of Rembrandt’s self-portraiture. The works are anintimate glimpse into the artist’s self-reflectionand nothing short of a triumph of art history.
The complete self-portraiture
Few devotees of the form can approachRembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s radical contributions to self-portraiture. Challenging the conventions enshrined by his predecessors, Rembrandt transformed the art into a fully realized medium capable ofcommunicating emotional depthrather than favorably immortalizing one’s likeness in the finest trappings of luxury. Withmore than 80 works spanning paintings, etchings, and drawings, the Dutchman’s lifelong practice of self-portraiture functions as a means ofconcretizing that which is fleeting. Across four decades, one constant is particularly striking across media and styles—Rembrandt’s dedication to presenting himself from multiple perspectives,celebrating the multiplicity of the individual and championing the unfiltered portrayal of emotional expression.Apart from the thematic concerns present within Rembrandt’s suite of self-portraits, the works themselves are rich withtechnical innovation and experimentation. There is anunmistakable humanity presentacross the entirety of this oeuvre, each expressive brushstroke and obfuscated feature amounting to anunflinchingly honest characterization of himself, in all his foibles, contrasting states of feeling, and stages of life.Thismonographrenders all of Rembrandt’s self-portraits – from his first experimentations at age twenty-two to his final self-portrait painted a year before his death – and standstestament to a life committed to revolutionizing painterly practice both in content and form.
