Self-portrait as Zeuxis Laughing

Rembrandt's Self-Portrait as Zeuxis Laughing of around 1668 in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne is among his most enigmatic late self-portraits and one of the most debated. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis was reportedly so skilled that birds pecked at his painted grapes; he was said to have died laughing while painting an old woman, according to Pliny. If that is indeed the reference here — Rembrandt at sixty-two, painting himself laughing while depicting an ugly old woman barely visible in the lower portion of the canvas — then the work is simultaneously darkly comic and profoundly melancholic: an old artist laughing at an old subject, finding amusement in death's approach. The alternative reading, that Rembrandt simply depicts himself laughing with creative pleasure, makes the work more benign but less interesting. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum holds the painting alongside major Baroque and later collections in a Cologne institution with one of the richest art-historical holdings in Germany.

The broadly painted surface, with areas of unfinished canvas visible, creates an effect of spectral transparency. Rembrandt's late technique reduces the self-portrait to essential elements—the laughing face emerging from deep shadow with almost abstract freedom.