Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1629)

A young man with a shock of unruly hair turns toward us, half his face thrown into deep shadow, the other half catching a cool light. Rembrandt was barely in his twenties when he painted this, and he uses his own features less for vanity than as a laboratory for light, expression, and the textures of skin and hair. Now in the Rijksmuseum, the small panel already shows the lifelong project that would produce dozens of self-portraits - the relentless study of his own face as it aged, a record without parallel in art.