The Portrait of an Old Woman with Spectacles by Rembrandt’s studio and Portrait of an Elderly Man by Rembrandt himself date from the 1640s. In the following decade the master produced one of his best-known pictures of someone who had lived a long life – the Portrait of an Old Man in Red depicting a person whose appearance and bearing convey dignity and strength of character. The face with the wrinkles of old age and the hands with their gnarled joints are conveyed with dense energetic brushstrokes typical of the artist’s late manner of painting. As the French art theoretician Roger de Piles (1635–1709) wrote with glowing delight, in Rembrandt’s portraits “every stroke of the brush endows the facial features with the vitality and veracity that we attribute with admiration to the master’s genius.”
The Portrait of Baertje Martens depicts the wife of the cabinet- and frame-maker Herman Doomer. The couple’s son, Lambert Doomer, was a pupil of Rembrandt and went on to become a famous landscape painter. The image of the elderly woman with her slightly embarrassed smile and lively gaze gains its charm from the naturalness of the mood that the artist subtly conveys.
