Rembrandt's Son Titus by http://www.wikidata.org/.well-known/genid/71ff8426ba08cb75975514bf2e983a9a

This is Rembrandt's portrait of his son, Titus van Rijn, painted around 1655 and now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. When Rembrandt made this work, he was spiraling into bankruptcy, his large house, his art collection, and his printing press would all be auctioned off within a few years. And yet here he paints his twelve-year-old son not as a victim of misfortune but with extraordinary tenderness and something close to reverence.

Look at the darkness around Titus's head. It is not uniform. A faint, warm aureole of light separates the boy's curls from the deep brown void behind him. It is subtle enough that you might scroll past it, but once you see it, the portrait shifts. Suddenly the white collar, the direct gaze, and the almost sacramental stillness of the face read differently. Rembrandt is borrowing the visual language of devotional painting, the halo, the emerging-from-shadow, and placing it on his own child.

Titus was the only one of Rembrandt's four children to survive into adulthood. He became an art dealer and, in a painful twist, ended up managing his father's financial affairs to protect him from creditors. He died in 1668, just seven months after his own wedding, at twenty-seven. Rembrandt outlived him.

A painter who had lost nearly everything still had this: the ability to take a dark canvas and put light exactly where love was.