Self-portrait wearing a Hat and two Chains

The self-portrait wearing a hat and two chains from around 1640 was painted at the peak of Rembrandt's social and commercial confidence: he was thirty-four, well established in Amsterdam, married to Saskia van Uylenburgh, living in the grand Jodenbreestraat house he had bought in 1639 on installment credit, and commanding the highest portrait prices in the Dutch Republic. The two chains and the fashionable hat are components of a carefully constructed self-image that claims status through the visual language of the Renaissance tradition — painters like Titian had similarly used chains and velvet to assert the social dignity of the artist as a learned professional rather than a craftsman. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which acquired the painting as part of the extraordinary twentieth-century Thyssen collection, holds it alongside major works by Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, and other Northern European masters whose tradition of painted self-assertion Rembrandt here consciously invokes.

The two chains and broad hat create a silhouette of prosperous confidence. Rembrandt illuminates his face with the warm diagonal light characteristic of this period, modeling the features with a combination of precise observation and expressive impasto in the highlights. The background is warm and tonally differentiated rather than a flat neutral.