Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar

Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar from 1659, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington as part of the Andrew W. Mellon collection that founded that institution, is among the most commanding of Rembrandt's late self-portraits. The previous year had brought the formal sale of his Jodenbreestraat house after his 1656 insolvency, and yet this portrait — roughly three-quarter length, the gaze level and unapologetic, the hands partially visible at the lower edge — projects an image of undiminished authority and creative self-assurance. The beret is the artist's cap inherited from Renaissance self-portraiture, and the turned-up collar an informal gesture toward the kind of casual dress that Rembrandt increasingly adopted as his social circumstances declined and his artistic ambitions deepened. Andrew Mellon acquired the painting as part of his systematic collection of European masterworks that he would donate to the American nation, and the National Gallery of Art's Rembrandt holdings remain among the most important outside the Netherlands.

Rembrandt builds the face with thick layers of paint applied with brush and palette knife, creating an almost sculptural surface. The restricted palette of warm browns and golds concentrates all attention on the powerfully modeled features and the penetrating, unsentimental gaze.