Self-Portrait at the Age of 63

Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 from 1669 in the National Gallery London is widely believed to be the last self-portrait Rembrandt painted before his death in October of that year, a work that has become one of the supreme images of human mortality and artistic persistence in Western art. Rembrandt had by this point outlived his wife Saskia, his companion Hendrickje Stoffels, and his son Titus — the three people who had mattered most to him — and was painting with the knowledge that his own death was imminent. The face in the National Gallery portrait makes no attempt at dignity in the conventional sense: the skin is aged, the expression weary, the composition stripped of all the theatrical accessories that had appeared in earlier self-portraits. Yet there is nothing defeated in it. The sustained gaze and the quality of presence that Rembrandt could still achieve in 1669 have impressed every painter and critic who has stood before the original, from Joshua Reynolds in the eighteenth century to Lucian Freud in the twentieth.

The late technique reaches its most economical expression, with the face built up in thick impasto while the clothing and background are rendered with minimal means. The warm, restricted palette concentrates all visual and emotional energy on the powerfully modeled features.