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Your galleryOld Man with a Gold Chain
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- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Look at the light on the steel gorget and the links of the chain, then find the monogram RHL in the lower left corner.
This is a tronie, a character study, the kind of picture that Rembrandt and his Leiden colleague Jan Lievens turned into an affordable alternative to a commissioned portrait. The model, once called Rembrandt’s father, may have kept an almshouse in Leiden. The gold chain appears in several of his pictures and must have been a studio prop, since, unlike Rubens and Van Dyck, he never received one from a royal patron.
Oil on panel · 83.1 × 75.7 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Renaissance · Dutch Golden Age
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Old Man with a Gold Chain
- Artist
- Rembrandt van Rijn
- Date
- 1631
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Dimensions
- 83.1 × 75.7 cm (32 3/4 × 29 3/4 in.); Framed: 105.1 × 99.5 cm (41 3/8 × 39 3/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.