Need help on analizing one of Rembrant Van Riji's painting, the "Self-P

Question:What should I say about that painting. Some ideas would help me analyse his paintint.

Thank you so much for helping.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: What should I say about that painting. Some ideas would help me analyse his paintint.

Thank you so much for helping.

Like the other post said, nobody is more famous for the number of self portraits done than Rembrandt. If you want to analize anyone of them, you ned to send a link for it. His work evolved and changed throughout his life from a very clean detailed work to a somwhat modern and abstract.

There are more than 100 self portraits.In an early self portrait done in 1629 he uses expressive light and shadow, and stares defiantly out at the viewer. The harsh, bright light coming from the left makes his features appear sharp, bold and determined.
In a portrait done in 1640, a softer, more flattering light bathes a highly successful, richly dressed master painter in his mid-30's. Twenty years later, in a portrait done in 1661 the rich clothing and defiant look are gone. Rembrandt's composition is very basic. And the elderly painter's face seems to be lit by a glow from within.
He created so many self portraits not so much because he wanted to reveal his innermost feelings, but in order to study facial expressions. But, like all great portraits, these works communicate the artist's personality and state of mind.

Rembrandt painted many self portraits. Some of the artists of the time put themselves in their paintings.
Often these are just faces in a crowd, often at the corner of the work, but a particular hybrid genre developed where historical scenes were depicted using a number of actual persons as models, often including the artist, giving the work a double function as portrait and history painting. Rubens and Rembrandt painted such scenes
A young Rembrandt, c. 1628, when he was 22. Partly an exercise in chiaroscuro. Rijksmuseum
Rembrandt in 1632, when he was enjoying great success as a fashionable portraitist in this style.
Role-playing in Self-portrait as an oriental Potentate with a Kris, etching, 1634.
Self-portrait leaning on a Sill, etching, 1639

1640, wearing a costume in the style of over a century earlier. National Gallery
Vienna c. 1655, oil on walnut, cut down in size.
Rembrandt - Self Portrait, 1659?, Edinburgh, detail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt

The debate over why Rembrandt made nearly ninety self-portraits continues, but the first exhibition devoted to these works reveals a profound forty-year exploration of what it is to be human.

he currents and crosscurrents of opinion in the field of art history are many and strong, and sometimes there are perilous riptides. Scholars and art critics of one era will set forth views that experts of later eras will decry, and in this ceaseless process sometimes the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
The art of Rembrandt van Rijn, the great seventeenth-century Dutch painter, has long been a magnet for conflicting scholarly opinion. Now the first exhibition ever devoted to his prodigious output of self-portraits--and more exactly the catalog for this exhibition--has expounded a recently prevailing outlook as to why the artist portrayed himself so many times. The show, which opened at London's National Gallery and is at the Mauritshuis in The Hague through January 9, displays sixty-six of these self-portrayals in paintings, etchings, and drawings, but the catalog itself reproduces all eighty-six works that, it says, "can reasonably be considered as self-portraits by Rembrandt."
It wasn't until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars studied Rembrandt's oeuvre as a whole, that it was discovered how very many times the artist had portrayed himself. The number is still a matter of contention, but it seems he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.
Most scholars up till about twenty years ago interpreted Rembrandt's remarkable series of self-portraits as a sort of visual diary, a forty-year exercise in self-examination. In a 1961 book, art historian Manuel Gasser wrote, "Over the years, Rembrandt's self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue: a lonely old man communicating with himself while he painted."
Many of these traditional studies focused particularly on Rembrandt's late self-portraits, as they reveal this rigorous self-reflection most profoundly. In an influential 1948 monograph on the artist, Jacob Rosenberg wrote of the
ceaseless and unsparing observation which [Rembrandt's self-portraits] reflect, showing a gradual change from outward description and characterisation to the most penetrating self-analysis and self-contemplation. ... Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man's inner life.
More recent scholarship has shed additional light on Rembrandt's early self-portrayals. Quite a few, it is argued, were tronies--head-and-shoulder studies in which the model plays a role or expresses a particular emotion. In the seventeenth century there was an avid market for such studies, which were considered a separate genre (although for an artist they also served as a storehouse of facial types and expressions for figures in history paintings). Thus, for example, we have four tiny etchings from 1630 that show Rembrandt, in turn, caught in fearful surprise, glowering with anger, smiling gamefully, and appearing to snarl--each expressed in lines that themselves embody the distinct emotions. Rembrandt may have used his own face because the model was cheap, but perhaps he was killing two birds with one stone. The art-buying public--which now included people from many walks of life, not only aristocratic or clerical patrons, as in the past--went for etchings of famous people, including artists. By using himself as the model for these and other studies, Rembrandt was making himself into a recognizable celebrity at the same time that he gave the public strikingly original and expressive tronies. The wide dissemination of these and other prints was important in establishing Rembrandt's reputation as an artist.

further infomation go here
http://www.worldandi.com/specialreport/r...