You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

They say that when Jean-Gernet made occasional visits to London after the war, his first stop was

always the Rembrandt room in the National Gallery to see self-portrait at the age of 63.

The portrait is dated 1669. Jeunet believed it was the last Rembrandt painted, not true, apparently.

He wrote a brief essay called Rembrandt's Secret for Lexpres in 1958, and in his unfailingly

manichaean way, he wanted to convince his readers of Rembrandt's goodness.

This is what the picture made manifest, he felt.

Goodness as a quality of character, primarily, looking evil in the face, but that aspect or dimension

of the human brought into being by the act of painting, fleshed out, so to speak.

I use the word bonte as shorthand, he wrote. Rembrandt's last self-portrait seems rather to be saying this,

I shall be so intelligent that even the wild animals will recognize my goodness.

The morality that guides the artist then is not the vain quest for a proper apparel for the soul in parrille de l'ab.

It is the metier itself, insisting on goodness, or rather bringing goodness in its wake.

These are difficult sentences, and my translation works hard, too hard, to make them easier.

But their terms came back to me immediately the other day, as I rounded the corner and stood in

Room 1 of Rembrandt the late works.

Out of the darkness came four self-portraits, the National Galleries, and paintings from

Washington, the Maurit's Huss, the Reichmuseum, plus a strange, half-effaced, tender, despairing

little print of the artist at work on an etching. The faces leaped towards me.

Who they were and what they were thinking seemed secondary to the

sheer outwardness of their attention, the wide-eyed, calm focus, which on one level might simply

be that of a painter intent on getting the shine on a nose imprinted in his nervous system.

...