Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man dated 1658 is one of the last works from his late career left in private hands and also one of the master’s least known paintings. A boldly conceived work painted in his most assured and painterly later manner, it depicts the sitter frontally and three quarter length with arms akimbo. The unidentified sitter meets the viewer’s gaze with a steady and confident expression, bordering on defiance. A young man in his prime, apparently in his thirties, he has broad chest, full form and wide face, featuring a short black beard. He wears a brown doublet with yellow and gold highlights, upturned collar, small buttons and a clasp at the chest, over a white chemise. On his head is a large black beret, sometimes called a notched bonnet. The fingers of his right hand are splayed across his hip and his thumb is tucked into the sash that encircles his waist. A strong light falls from the upper left illuminating his face and catching highlights on his right shoulder and the sleeve of his left arm, expertly turning the figure in space and impressing on the viewer the sitter’s substance and authority. The broad strokes of paint that model the figure are applied with great confidence, mostly in layers, often slashed and dragged over painted substrata , or hatched with a lively staccato stroke, brilliantly conveying the richness of his striated garment and its glinting fabric. The effect is of a rich abundance of textures, despite a limited palette of only a few colors. The painting was executed in one of the most innovative but also the most difficult moments of Rembrandt’s career. The artist had enjoyed remarkable professional success in the first decade following his arrival in Amsterdam in 1631/32, but over the course of the 1640s he received (or perhaps only accepted) fewer requests for lucrative portraits. By the mid 1650s his expansive lifestyle and the mismanagement of his finances had created a precarious life. In 1656 he was forced to declare bankruptcy. His art collections and possessions were gradually auctioned off between 1656 and 1658 and in the latter year he was forced to sell his elegant house on the Sint Anthoniebreestraat and move across town to a more modest home in the Jordaan. He was required by the insolvency courts to enter into an agreement whereby he worked as an employee for his son, Titus, and common law wife, Hendrijkje, to protect him from his creditors. Works like the ravishing Portrait of Nicolaes Bruynigh of 1652 (Gemäldegalerie, Kassel) and the noble Portrait of Jan Six (Six Foundation, Amsterdam) and the Floris Soop (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) of 1654 prove that Rembrandt had tried in the early 1650s to revive his career as a portraitist to Amsterdam’s wealthy investors and businessmen and had provided excellent service. But in the late 1650s there are very few works that would attest to regular commissions; indeed the only image aside from the present work that was dated between 1657 and 1659 is the Portrait of Catharina Hooghsaet (Penryn Castle), which shares passages of brilliance with the present work but which is a much more conventionalized portrait . And indeed there are only two other works dated 1658 in Rembrandt’s entire oeuvre: the incomparably magisterial Self Portrait (fig. 1, Frick Collection, New York) and the sadly abraded but dramatically conceived little Philomen and Baucis (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Not only is the subject of the present work unknown but it is even uncertain that it is a portrait at all and not simply an image of a picturesque individual in an historicized costume with vaguely exotic associations. Certainly the person depicted has individualized features but he is not readily a figure from Rembrandt’s world; the head of the Rembrandt Research Committee, Ernst van de Wetering, has speculated that he might have been a visitor to Amsterdam, possibly from the Mediterranean. The costume specialist, Marieke de Winkel, has noted that the figure’s outfit has little to do with contemporary, e.g. seventeenth century costume, but notes that fanciful, antique elements, such as the notched bonnet/beret appear in self portraits by Rembrandt that are derived from earlier sixteenth century haberdashery.