page_title: Portrait of a Young Man with a Golden Chain
section_title: Portrait or self-portrait?
hierarchical_section_title: Portrait of a Young Man with a Golden Chain / The painting / Portrait or self-portrait?
context_page_description: Portrait of a Young Man with a Gold Chain is an oil painting usually attributed to the Dutch painter Rembrandt. Signed and dated 1635, it was traditionally regarded as a self-portrait, although contemporary criticism tends to challenge this hypothesis.
  The accreditation of this work to Rembrandt is old and supported by various documents and graphic records dating back to the seventeenth century. However, a report by the Rembrandt Research Project in 1989 assigned it to the "circle" of the Dutch master. This new assignment was controversial: the opinion was challenged by Pietro Maria Bardi and Luiz Marques, among other experts, who credit the authorship of the painting to Rembrandt. The work is currently preserved at the São Paulo Museum of Art.
context_section_description: As old as the accreditation to Rembrandt is the belief that the work would have been a self-portrait completed around 1635. From the second half of the 20th century, many historians have challenged this hypothesis, based on other self-portraits painted in the same period.
  Kurt Bauch is the first. In 1966, the German historian questioned the traditional identification of the portrait, preferring to name the work with a generic title of Junger Mann in Reicher Tracht ("The young in rich costumes"). Two years later, Horst Gerson supported Bauch's doubts, followed by Paolo Lecaldano (1969) and Christopher Wright (1981).
  In 1989, the belief from the Rembrandt Commission did not only disagree with the hypothesis of the work being a self-portrait, but denies the Rembrandt accreditation.  Luiz Marques differs from this belief which refers to the authorship, but considers the traditional hypothesis that it is "extremely unlikely" a self-portrait, adding that a comparison between this  portrait in the São Paulo Museum of Art and two self-portraits from the 1630s, in the Louvre and in the Gemäldegalerie, reveal that the similarities are basically characteristic of portraits of that time period.
caption: Rembrandt. Self-Portrait, 1634. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa 2.7", "Image ExifOffset": "50", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "126", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "6fdc69009f355e315a28bf43b5935725"}