The Circumcision

Rembrandt van Rijn

National Gallery of Art

In a space almost entirely shrouded in shadow, light falls across a bearded man kneeling in front of a woman cradling an infant, as about a dozen people to our left look on in this horizontal painting. The people all appear to have light skin, though some are deep in shadow. The scene is painted with dabs and soft strokes of peanut and coffee brown, golden yellow, ivory, smoke gray, and muted terracotta red, so many of the details are indistinct. At the bottom center of the painting, the man, woman, and baby are small in scale, reaching less than halfway up the composition. The kneeling man wears a long, pale yellow robe that pools around his bent legs. Facing our right in profile, he has a fringe of gray hair around his balding head and a gray beard. He reaches out toward the baby resting along the woman's lap. The man holds an instrument like a stylus at the baby’s groin, and the child’s legs are bare. The infant is wrapped in a white cloth over his head and torso, and gold-colored fabric drapes over his head and shoulders. With tiny, rounded features, the baby looks toward the man at his feet. The woman wears a long-sleeved, muted red dress with white fabric across her chest. She looks down, and her head is wrapped with a pale gray turban that falls to either side of her face and covers her hair. At the front of the group of men and women looking on, to our left, a bearded man wearing a brown turban, a waist-length dark gray cape, and a lighter gray robe writes in an open book slung over his forearm. Several people, most also wearing turbans in silver gray, ruby red, or terracotta brown look over the man’s shoulder. A few more people look down at the scene from the shadows above, near the upper left corner of the painting. Behind the woman and child, a ladder leans against a platform, perhaps a loft, and draped fabric creates a canopy over the woman. A jumble of objects there merge with the deep shadows.