Begging for Attention: The Artful Context of Rembrandt's Etching "Beggar Seated on a Bank"

Two figural motifs recur frequently in Rembrandt's etchings of the 1630s: ragged peasants and the artist’s own startlingly expressive face. On a copperplate that he treated like a page from a sketchbook, these disparate subjects are juxtaposed.1 And in an etching of 1630, they merge, as Rembrandt himself takes on the role of a hunched figure seated on a rocky hillock (fig. 1). Early cataloguers such as Edme-Francois Gersaint (1751) and Adam Bartsch (1797) failed to notice the resemblance and classified the print with other studies of beggars rather than with self-portraits.2 Ignace-Joseph de Claussin (1824) was apparently the first to observe that "the physiognomy has a great deal of resemblance to Rembrandt."3 This discovery was overlooked by later cataloguers more concerned with distinguishing states of the print and separating it from deceptive copies.4 It was taken up again by Arthur Hind (1912), who drew a convincing connection to Rembrandt's Self-Portrait Open-Mouthed as if Shouting, also dated 1630 (fig. 2).5 Nevertheless, in most modern sources it has retained the title Beggar Seated on a Bank.6 Gersaint described the beggar's frizzled hair and ruined garments, but Daniel Daulby (1796) was the first to remark on the emotional intensity of this figure "asking alms with a countenance full of distress." Bartsch described him as groaning in misery.7