Rembrandt Painted Himself His Whole Life — and the Best-Loved Portrait Is the Least Flattering

There's a painting in London I haven't been able to forget since the first time I saw it. A man of about sixty, facing forward, looking straight at whoever looks back. The face is tired. The skin isn't lovely. There's no clever lighting, no impressive clothing, nothing to draw the eye away. And for a great many people who know about art, it is the most beautiful self-portrait ever painted.

The man is Rembrandt. The painting is Self-Portrait with Two Circles, from around 1665.

What fascinates me isn't only the painting. It's the road to it.

He painted himself his whole life

Rembrandt painted himself around forty times. Add the etchings and the drawings and you pass eighty images of his own face, made across virtually his entire career. No other artist looked at himself that much.

And here's the interesting part: he didn't paint himself the same way twice.

The young Rembrandt is almost theatrical. He turns up in costume, in hats, under dramatic light, pulling faces — in the early etchings he's trying out expressions, eyes wide, mouth open, brows raised. A young man playing in front of a mirror, testing what his own face could do.

Then come the prosperous years, around the 1640s. He was the most sought-after portraitist in Amsterdam, he was earning well, and he painted himself well-dressed and well-groomed, in poses that deliberately nodded to the great Renaissance masters. A man showing you he had arrived.

And then 1665.

What had happened in between

By the time he painted the London picture, Rembrandt had lost his wife, three children, and the companion who came after her. He had been declared insolvent in 1656 and lived out his life in modest circumstances. He kept receiving important commissions, he was still respected — but life had gone over him.

And the painting hides none of it. A plain frontal pose. Broad brushwork, no fussiness. No ostentation anywhere. A face marked by time and by loss — and, at the same time, entirely steady. Someone once described this Rembrandt as battered by life but undefeated, and that's exactly right.

He didn't get more beautiful. He got truer. And that's when he made the painting the whole world keeps.

An honest pause: we don't know why

I need to be fair to the history here, because there's a romantic version of this story in wide circulation that historians now treat with some suspicion.

The romantic version says the self-portraits are a diary — a painted autobiography, a soul examining itself year after year. It's a lovely idea. It's also now generally regarded as sentimental and not very historical.

The truth is more modest: Rembrandt never explained why he made so many. He left nothing behind about it. We barely even know who owned the paintings during his lifetime.

There are far less poetic explanations. One is commercial: he made his living painting portraits, and keeping self-portraits to hand worked as a sample — a prospective client could compare the flesh-and-blood Rembrandt with the painted one and judge for himself whether the man could catch a likeness. Another is more practical still: a model who is always available and never charges. Van Gogh, centuries later, bought a mirror for exactly that reason — with no model to hand, he would do.

It was probably several different reasons, at different points in a long life. Complicated people rarely do anything for one reason.

I tell you this because I think the story is better this way, not worse. The painting doesn't need to be a diary to be true. It is what it is: a man who looked at himself carefully for decades and, at the end, painted himself without a discount.

The mirror is more recent than you'd think

There's a technical detail in all this that I love.

Self-portraits barely existed before the Renaissance, and one of the reasons is wonderfully mundane: there were no good mirrors. It took advances in glassmaking in the 15th century to make mirrors easier to produce. They stayed expensive — but they came within reach of an artist.

Which means we only started painting our own faces once we could finally see them properly.

And the first thing that happened once it became possible is exactly what you'd expect. In 1484, a boy of twelve or thirteen named Albrecht Dürer drew himself and wrote beside it that he had drawn himself "from the looking-glass." A teenager, a new mirror, and the immediate urge to record his own face. Six hundred years later we do the same thing with a phone.

There was a social shift too. Portraits stopped being the preserve of kings and bishops and started moving down the scale — a successful merchant could commission one. And an artist could use a self-portrait to say I'm somebody too. In 1664 a Medici began collecting artists' self-portraits; that collection became the holdings of the Uffizi in Florence, still the most remarkable of its kind anywhere.

What this has to do with us

I think about this a lot while I'm getting ready.

Because there's an easy reading of this story — see, the honest portrait is the one that counts, throw away your filters. And that isn't what I see here at all. The Rembrandt in costume and the Rembrandt with nothing to hide behind are the same man. He didn't stop making beautiful images when he got honest. He got better at both at once.

The years of hats and poses weren't a mistake he corrected later. They were the training. It was by looking a great deal — vainly, some of it — that he learned how to really look.

So no, getting yourself ready isn't silly vanity, and the good photograph isn't a lie. The question is a different one: are you the one doing the looking? Or are you trying to guess at someone else's eye?

What moves me about the 1665 painting isn't that it's plain. It's that it's his. Nobody commissioned it, nobody paid for it, nobody said how it should turn out. A man of sixty deciding, on his own, how he wants to be seen — and choosing the version that apologises for nothing.

I think that's the opposite of giving up on beauty. I think it's the grown-up form of it.

If you'd like to look

Self-Portrait with Two Circles hangs at Kenwood House in London, and the image circulates in the public domain — it's worth opening full-screen and sitting with for a while. Look at the face first, and only afterwards at the two mysterious arcs painted on the wall behind him, which nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.

And tell me: if you could keep one single portrait of yourself, would it be the most beautiful one or the most like you? I've been turning that over since I read this story.

Read next

• The Boy in the Painting Died Before Hogarth Finished It — Another painting that chose the truth over the pose.
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