Old Man with a Gold Chain

Rembrandt painted Old Man with a Gold Chain around 1631, a tronie or character study from the period when he was simultaneously building his Amsterdam portrait practice and developing the free market for independent works that tronies supplied. The old man in rich costume — the gold chain suggesting wealth or honor, the face suggesting a lifetime of experience — belongs to the category of Rembrandt's subjects that combine technical virtuosity in rendering varied surfaces (the chain's metallic lustre, the fur collar, the weathered skin) with the psychological observation of age that distinguished his approach from more conventionally idealized treatments. The painting's attribution and current location at 'Julius Böhler AG' suggests it may be in a Munich art dealership's holdings or a private collection; Böhler was a significant Munich dealer whose inventories included many Old Master works. Rembrandt's old man subjects draw on a long tradition of Dutch and German portraiture of aged faces, from Dürer's self-portraits of old age through the physiognomically rich subjects that Rembrandt encountered in the artist-theorist Jan van Eyck's legacy.

The heavy gold chain draped across the old man's chest catches the light with lustrous brilliance, contrasting with the dark fur and the deeply lined face modeled in warm, nuanced flesh tones.