Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts

Catalogue number: Bredius 145.

Rembrandt began to work as a professional portraitist about 1631. His earliest existing commissioned portraits (Portrait of a Scholar, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg; Portrait of the Amsterdam Merchant Nicolaes Ruts, Frick Collection, New York) are both of that year.

Nicolaes Ruts (1586-1649) was an Amsterdam meerchant in the Russian trade, born Mennonite and converted to Calvinism.