During his lifetime, Rembrandt's extraordinary skills as a printmaker were the main source of his international fame. Unlike his oil paintings, prints travelled light and were relatively cheap. For this reason, they soon became very popular with collectors not only within, but also beyond the borders of the Netherlands.
Rembrandt devoted himself to self-portraiture throughout his life, and this genre forms a substantial portion of his oeuvre. In his early career, his self-portraits were essentially studies, in which the artist learned to capture facial features and to express various grimaces and different states of mind. The spontaneous and energetic handling of the etching needle, heightened by contrasts of light and dark over the sitter’s face endow this portrait with emotional depth and a lifelike quality. This is one of Rembrandt’s earliest self-portraits creating the work when he was about 24 years old.