Leiden and Amsterdam · About forty years of self-exploration

Rembrandt's self-portraits follow an entire career, from youthful expression studies to masterful meditations on age and the profession of painter.

Rembrandt used his own face for almost forty years. The first images with disheveled hair study surprise, shadow and grimace; the portraits in berets and gold chains then assert a social and artistic status inspired by Renaissance masters. Later, he depicts himself as an apostle Paul or in front of the two circles, transforming the painter's costume and tools into a reflection on his identity. About eighty self-portraits - paintings, etchings and drawings - have survived, a corpus without equivalent among his contemporaries. The "Rembrandt Self-Portraits" selection notably compares Self-Portrait with Tousled Hair - Rembrandt and Self-Portrait with Beret and Collar law - Rembrandt. Its reading favors the material.

At Rembrandt, the face is never a simple document: it becomes a workshop where light, matter, age and social role are continually reinvented.