Went to the
Young Rembrandt exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford yesterday. I hadn't slept well and generally felt like shit but despite that it was still a very interesting exhibition – mainly because it exhibited stuff that Rembrandt did when he was young and still learning, so you got to see examples of him
failing. It gives us mere mortals hope, to know that Rembrandt wasn't absolutely killing it from day one.
As you walk through, of course, he gets better and better and hits upon his characteristic style (strong contrasts of light and dark – there's a daylit history painting he did a few years before he came into his own which is skilful but also quite ugly and hardly the sort of thing to make you think 'genius!") – and you can see that he's well on the way to becoming an Old Master by the end.
This was the most magical painting in the exhibition:
![oldman.jpg oldman.jpg](https://www.dissensus.com/data/attachments/4/4396-5a9467ecdef83b697ed2bf0cb5933b9f.jpg)