Portrait of Maerten Soolmans

The 1634 portrait of Maerten Soolmans in the Hermitage Museum is one half of the most expensive jointly purchased works in art history: in 2015, the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam jointly purchased both the Soolmans and the pendant portrait of his bride Oopjen Coppit for €160 million, the highest price ever paid for Dutch Golden Age paintings. Maerten Soolmans was a wealthy young Amsterdam sugar trader of Flemish origin, and the portraits were commissioned on the occasion of his marriage to Oopjen Coppit in 1634 — the same year as Rembrandt's own marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh. The full-length format was unusual in Dutch portraiture of the 1630s, where three-quarter length was the typical scale, and the choice signals both the sitters' social ambitions and Rembrandt's own — placing himself in the tradition of van Dyck's aristocratic full-lengths that had recently transformed English court portraiture.

Rembrandt renders the full-length figure with extraordinary attention to the rich black costume and its subtle textural variations, using the fashionable dress to establish social status while the face conveys individual character.