Rembrandt - Self-Portrait in a Gorget, 1629

[Of Rembrandt's early work]...there isnt a girl in the lot. You would have thought that R was living in a land of outcasts and ancients, not at home with a clutch of brothers and sisters and, surely, a young maidservant or two. Ripeness, the firm lines of a face or body not yet marked by cares, and easy, graceful movements seem not to have caught his eye at this point (they would later, but he would view them as a middle-aged man who knows how perishable they are.) Even at this early stage in his career, he seems to have felt that it was his task as an artist to depict decline and the indignities and impairments that are visited on all living flesh as it ages. No doubt this was less a concious choice