Titus as a Monk

Titus as a Monk of 1660 is one of the most tender works Rembrandt made of his only surviving child, painted the year after their forced departure from the grand Jodenbreestraat house following bankruptcy and the sale of Rembrandt's celebrated collection of art, curiosities, and studio props. Titus van Rijn was eighteen or nineteen at the time and had legally inherited his mother Saskia's estate in a guardianship arrangement that protected it from his father's creditors — one of the most painful ironies of Rembrandt's financial ruin. The Franciscan or Capuchin habit Titus wears is probably a studio costume rather than religious dress, but Rembrandt's choice to depict his son in monastic garb carries its own poignancy: renunciation of the world, poverty chosen rather than forced. Titus would marry Magdalena van Loo in 1668 and die within the year, seven months before his father. The Pushkin Museum acquired the painting as part of the twentieth-century dispersal of European masterworks into Russian national collections.

Rembrandt renders Titus's youthful face with extraordinary sensitivity against the coarse brown monastic robe. The restricted palette and contemplative mood are achieved through subtle tonal modulations and the characteristic late technique of combining impasto with translucent glazes.