Self-Portrait at the Age of 34

Rembrandt painted his Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 in 1640, a calculated statement of artistic ambition that deliberately echoes the poses of Raphael (from his Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione) and Titian (from the Portrait of a Man, also called Ariosto) — both works that Rembrandt had seen at auction in Amsterdam in 1639. By positioning himself in the tradition of these Renaissance masters, Rembrandt was claiming his place in the canon of European painting at its highest level. The painting dates from the height of his Amsterdam success: wealthy commissions, a prosperous household, and the social recognition that the Night Watch of 1642 would celebrate and simultaneously begin to erode as fashionable taste shifted away from his dramatic manner. The rich costume of dark velvet with a lace collar and the confident three-quarter pose project an image of artistic authority rather than bourgeois contentment. The National Gallery's holding of this self-portrait places it in a context where the Arnolfini Portrait by Van Eyck — which influenced Rembrandt's understanding of self-portraiture as artistic statement — hangs in the same building.

The warm, golden palette and the richly textured fur-trimmed coat and velvet beret project an image of confident prosperity, while Rembrandt's softly modeled face shows the beginning of the psychological depth that would deepen in his later self-portraits.