The second large Rembrandt taken from the Dutch Room is a formal double portrait—a man and woman standing in the black dress typical of prosperous Dutch bourgeois subjects in the 1630s. Like *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee*, it was painted in 1633, the same productive year that produced several of Rembrandt’s most important works.
Double portraits of this kind were common commissions in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The merchant class wanted records of itself—paintings that documented prosperity, respectability, and marital partnership. Rembrandt’s versions of these formal subjects are distinguished by the psychological specificity he brings to the faces: each figure is an individual rather than a type.
The painting was cut from its frame, as *The Storm on the Sea of Galilee* was, and carried out rolled or folded. Its current physical condition is unknown.
**Rembrandt, *Self-Portrait*, c. 1634 (etching)**
Among the most distinctive objects taken from the Gardner—distinctive because of its scale and its medium—is a self-portrait etching by Rembrandt, acquired by the museum in 1886. The piece is tiny: approximately postage-stamp size, or slightly larger. It depicts the artist in the characteristic searching manner of his self-portraits, with the face rendered in dense hatching on a small copper plate.
Etchings of this kind were produced in multiple impressions. Rembrandt’s etchings exist in numerous impressions across multiple international collections. But this specific impression—this particular piece of paper, printed from this specific plate at a specific moment—is the one that has been missing since 1990.