“[This self portrait] shows us Rembrandt’s face during the later years of his life. It was not a beautiful face, and Rembrandt certainly never tried to conceal its ugliness. He observed himself in a mirror with complete sincerity. It is because of this sincerity that we soon forget to ask about beauty or looks. This is the face of a real human being…
We feel we know this man. We have seen other portraits by great masters which are memorable for the way they sum up a person’s character and role. But even the greatest of them may remind us of characters in fiction or actors on the stage. They are convincing and impressive, but we sense that they can only represent one side of a complex human being. Not even the Mona Lisa can always have smiled. But in Rembrandt’s great portraits we feel face to face with real people, we sense their warmth, their need for sympathy and also their loneliness and their suffering.”
E.H. Gombrich
Notes on Wonder 