Man in a Fur-lined Coat

Man in a Fur-Lined Coat from 1656 in the Toledo Museum of Art belongs to the class of Rembrandt's later tronies in which the costume is both a technical challenge — the rendering of fur, with its soft, light-trapping surface, was among the most demanding problems in oil painting — and a vehicle for the kind of ambiguous historical-fictional identity that he found creatively productive. The fur coat had been a staple of his costume collection since the early Leiden years: it appears in self-portraits, tronies, and historical figures throughout his career as a signifier of warmth, age, and dignified prosperity. By 1656 — the year of his insolvency — his actual costume collection was about to be sold at auction, and the works of this period may carry an elegiac quality: painting with materials he would soon lose. The Toledo Museum holds the work alongside the Young Man with a Plumed Hat (1631), allowing comparison of his tronie production across a quarter century.

Rembrandt renders the fur with extraordinary textural richness, using thick, varied brushwork to capture the different weights and reflective qualities of the material while the face is modeled with sensitive restraint.