Beggar Seated on a Bank,

1630

Beggars were a daily presence in seventeenth-century Holland and were often satirized as objects of fear and disgust. Rembrandt’s more compassionate portrayal of these social outcasts, who figure most prominently in prints from his early years in Leiden (1626–31), occasionally intersects with two themes that occupied him throughout his career: self-portraiture and women with children. In this free and wiry etching, Rembrandt lends his own features to a seated vagabond with ragged cloak and scraggly beard, who stretches out his hand to beg as he snarls at us. Unique among Rembrandt’s many exercises in role-playing, this self-identification with the down-and-out has been recently interpreted as a humorous response to the challenge of being a struggling artist who is reduced to begging for recognition from wealthy patrons.