Titus at his desk

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Titus at his desk: Rembrandt

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Rembrandt Oil Painting - Titus at his desk

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Work Overview: Titus at his desk
Rembrandt
signed and dated ‘Rembrandt f. 1655’
Oil on Canvas
77 x 63 cm
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

The boy, who sits staring ahead, is lost in thought. His thumb presses against his chin. There are some papers on the desk, and he holds a pen in his right hand and a pen case in his left. That this is a portrait of Rembrandt’s son, Titus, is not in doubt. An important clue to this is that there are several other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period that unmistakably show the same boy. There is, moreover, a strong similarity between this work and the portrait etching of a boy by Rembrandt, which a seventeenth-century source tells us is of Titus (fig.2). In the print, Titus wears a beret just like the one in the painting.

Titus van Rijn was born in 1641 and was the only child of Rembrandt and Saskia van Uylenburgh to survive into adulthood. Saskia died in the year after his birth and Titus was entrusted to the care of, firstly, Geertge Dircx and then Hendrickje Stoffels. After Rembrandt's bankruptcy, Hendrickje and Titus set up an art-dealing business in order to provide Rembrandt with protection against his creditors. Titus was trained by his father as a painter but hardly any trace of his artistic activities survive. After Hendrickje's death in 1663 Titus continued the art-dealing business. He married in 1668 but died in the same year, twelve months before his father.

Titus's features appear in a number of paintings by Rembrandt. He showed him in the habit of a monk (Rijksmuseum), seated reading (Vienna) and wearing an elegant costume, beret and gold chain (Wallace Collection). Here he is seen as a schoolboy, seated at his desk, day-dreaming over his homework. In his right hand is his quill pen and his penholder and inkpot are in his left. The portrait is painted very freely - the boy's arms and his papers are indicated by no more than single brushstrokes - and on the desk can be seen the broad marks of Rembrandt's palette knife.

What is slightly curious about the present picture is that Titus appears to be represented as a younger boy than he actually was. Shown seated, or perhaps standing, at a desk and puzzling over his homework, he has the large eyes, rounded cheeks and small mouth of a child of eight or nine, rather than those of a boy of his true age, which was fourteen.

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