On Father’s Day this week’s picture is Rembrandt’s portrait of his son, Titus, wearing a superb brick-red beret and with a look of unblinking self-possession on his youthful face. The painting is on permanent display at the Wallace Collection, in London. Of the twelve “Rembrandts” described in the catalogue of that collection when it was originally bequeathed to the nation in 1897, this is the only work to retain its full attribution unchallenged. Not even the scholarly Doubting Thomases of the Rembrandt Research Project, who made it their lives’ work to pare the artist’s oeuvre down to its authentic essence, ever thought to question the authenticity of Titus. It remains quintessential Rembrandt: a picture trembling with life, but also shadowed by intimations of mortality.

Titus van Rijn was the only one of Rembrandt’s four children by his first wife, Saskia van Uylenbergh, to survive infancy. The Wallace Collection portrait has been slightly cut down in size by one of its owners, resulting in the loss of most of Rembrandt’s signature (which survives only as a cursive “R” next to the slope of the sitter’s left shoulder) and all traces of a date. Comparison with another portrait, done in 1655 and now in the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, of an evidently younger, dreamier and less guileful Titus, suggests that this picture must have been painted approximately two or three years later. The boy would have been about sixteen at the time: a significant age, or so it seemed to his father, who invested his portrait with an appropriate air of expectancy. Titus has not been merely depicted; he has been thrown into a dramatic situation where – every detail seems to proclaim it – Something Is About To Happen.

The lighting, as so often in Rembrandt’s work, is...

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