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Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts


Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Dutch; 17th-century

Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
91%

Portrait of a Young Man in an Armchair. c1660. Oil on canvas

This is an above-average Rembrandt portrait, meaning it's squarely a masterpiece in overall terms. Much of its greatness has to do with the way the background of the painting is functionally a neutral surface but is actually a storm of gradations and little touches: browns and oranges reach through the dark; the lower left corner is just so much blacker than the upper right; the chairback's top is slightly aureoled, which a daub of bright paint above the subject's shoulder echoes. All this subtle liveliness to the background makes the black cloak in the foreground that much more solidly black, such that the few real bits of substance in the picture — hands, face, collar of the sitter — appear to be leaking out from an abyss. It's like the painting's surface is puddled with the raw stuff of representation. Too, the chair is off: it's torqued, its back at a slightly different angle than its arm. This makes the sitter — who, as I said, is mostly an abyss leaking image — seem to possess a spatial logic all to himself. He commands the whole arrangement, apologizing for no infelicities of rendering or perspective. (TFS, 2025)