Man with a Falcon (possibly St. Bavo)

Man with a Falcon from 1661, sometimes identified as Saint Bavo holding the hawk that is his iconographic attribute as patron saint of Haarlem, belongs to the category of works in which Rembrandt's late practice deliberately blurs the boundaries between portrait, tronie, historical painting, and devotional image. The identification with Bavo was proposed partly because of the falcon — Bavo was a Flemish nobleman who gave away his possessions to follow Saint Amand — but Rembrandt is not known to have had specific connections to Haarlem's civic religion, and the subject may simply be a costumed model whose historical identity interested Rembrandt as an occasion for paint. What is certain is the quality of the work: the paint handling is among the freest of his final decade, the impasto building up the falcon's feathers and the figure's clothing in thick, directional strokes that reward close examination. The Gothenburg Museum of Art holds the painting in a Scandinavian collection that developed strong holdings in Dutch and Flemish Baroque painting through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The figure emerges from deep shadow with Rembrandt's characteristic late technique of broadly applied paint and dramatic chiaroscuro. The textures of fur, feather, and flesh are rendered through varied impasto and glazing that creates tactile immediacy.