Rembrandt's portrait of himself at the National Gallery, painted when he was thirty-two, is not one of his remarkable achievements.

It is a little timid in the handling, but that it is an excellent likeness none can doubt.

This bold-eyed, quietly observant, jolly-looking man was not quite the presentment of Rembrandt that the child had imagined; but Rembrandt at this period was something of a sumptuous dandy, proud of his brave looks and his fur-trimmed mantle.
Life was his province.

No subject was vulgar to him so long as it presented problems of light and construction and drawing.

Rembrandt, like Montaigne, was never didactic.