The Artists Son Titus

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The Artists Son Titus: Rembrandt

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Rembrandt Oil Painting - The Artists Son Titus

Keywords: Artists, Titus

Work Overview: Titus, the Artist's Son
Rembrandt
Netherlands
c. 1657
Painting
Oil on canvas
Image size: 68.5 x 57.3 cm

Titus van Rijn (1641-68) was the only one of Rembrandt’s four children by his first wife Saskia to survive infancy. A portrait of Titus looking up from his desk, dated 1655, is in the Boijmans-van-Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. In the present painting, Titus appears to be about two years older, so it may be dated to c.1657. The year 1657 was a troubled one for Rembrandt and his family. The previous year the artist had been declared bankrupt and the fifteen-year-old Titus and his stepmother Hendrickje Stoffels were forced to administer the sale of Rembrandt’s pictures and the production of his etchings following the legal constraints imposed upon the painter by the Guild. Rembrandt sympathetically captures the young man’s serious gaze, a look very different in feeling from the childlike glance seen in the Rotterdam picture. Titus went on to study painting with his father, but sadly died in the year of his marriage, 1668, before the birth of his own daughter, Titia. Rembrandt himself died the following year and was buried in the Westerkerk, Amsterdam.
The portrait of Titus was acquired by the 4th Marquess of Hertford at the Willem II of Holland sale in the Hague in 1850 for 6,000 florins. Of the twelve Rembrandts thought to be in the Collection when it was bequeathed to the Nation in 1897, this is the only work to retain its full attribution to Rembrandt unchallenged.

Titus (1641-1668) was the last child born to Saskia and the only one to survive infancy. As with Hendrickje, there are no documented portraits of him, but about four or five portraits of the same boy are known, painted between 1655 and about 1662, and it would be unreasonable to doubt that they represent Titus. Rembrandt also made a number of drawings of him and may have used him as a model for religious pictures. Titus himself grew up to be an artist and several of his drawings have been identified. Titus could have enjoyed a comfortable life. After the settlement of Rembrandt's bankruptcy and his reaching the age of legal majority, the courts paid him nearly seven thousand guilders from Saskia's bequest. From 1660 he acted jointly with Hendrickje as his father's dealer but he died as a young man in 1668, the year before Rembrandt himself.

The present picture was painted at the time of Rembrandt's bankruptcy, when Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels were administering the sale of his pictures. The portrait has been slightly reduced on the right.

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Rembrandt

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