REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn
(b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)

Man in a Golden Helmet

c. 1650
Oil on canvas, 68 x 59 cm
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Catalogue number: Bredius 128.

Rembrandt's portrait was particularly admired by the generation of Impressionist painters as a model example of their own view of art. It has lost none of its popularity, despite commercial exploitation, although it is questionable whether this has contributed to a genuine appreciation of the picture. All too many reproductions have given the public a preconceived image of it, before actually seeing the original. It is therefore all the more necessary to try to make a detached assessment of the work.

Bode regarded the helmet as primarily an artistic end in itself. His generation, too, may have viewed the work in a more sentimental light, associating it with knights of yore and deeds of heroism. It was precisely these associations that prompted attempts to rob the unknown man with the sinister expression of his anonymity and to link him with the personal life of the painter; the theory that the man was Rembrandt's brother, Adriaen, a cobbler in Leiden, has never been substantiated.

The painting is not a portrait in the strictest sense; it was not commissioned, as so many portraits were, by prosperous Dutch citizens. The artist has captured not the splendidly armoured figure of an officer or general of his time but the tired features of an old man, who occasionally sat for him, and the gleaming splendour of an old helmet, which was part of Rembrandt's collection.

The painter's tendency to change the normal appearance of people - himself not excluded - by the use of finery and costumes is noticeable in a number of his pictures. Nevertheless, one cannot afford to neglect the motives which first inspired the artist to choose his theme, even if it offers little scope for original interpretation. Was it Rembrandt's intention to portray the unknown man as Mars? The God of War, richly helmeted, is by no means unknown as a theme in Dutch painting. The fact that such questions of interpretation are posed at all is characteristic of Rembrandt's art, in which the material and the spiritual are indissolubly linked.

Recently the attribution to Rembrandt has been questioned by both art historians and conservators.