Census record · museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
- Holder
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- Place
- London, United Kingdom
- Accession
- CAI.715
- Title as catalogued
- Self portrait in a velvet cap with plume
- Date as catalogued
- 1638
- Medium as catalogued
- Etching
- State
- I
- State, verbatim
- First state
- Catalogue references
- Bibliography cites Bartsch (Vienna 1797); White & Boon 1969; Hollstein; Hind 1923 (no specific numbers printed in the online record)
- Plate
- —
- Sheet
- 142 x 110 (recorded as 'trimmed to')
- Watermark
- —
- Collector marks
- —
- Provenance
- Bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides
- Credit line
- Bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides
- Condition
- —
- Rights
- Not stated
- Source
- https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1023205/self-portrait-in-a-velvet-print-rembrandt-van-rijn/
- Checked
- 2026-08-12 — Project — record read directly from the holding institution's own published record
Transcription notes
Physical description verbatim: 'Etching depicting a man wearing a mezetin velvet cap with feather, and over-gown embroidered at the collar and cuffs and fur-lined at the collar.' Marks: 'Rembrandt. f / 1638 (top left)'. The V&A's stated 'First state' conflicts with the ~140 mm sheet being larger than the plate; the record gives height 14.2 cm and width 11 cm 'trimmed to', so this is the sheet. Cross-check: V&A system number O1023205. Retrieved from the V&A open API (no key required) - an API not named in the brief, added opportunistically. No catalogue reference field is returned. A web-search snippet described this impression as a 'first state'; the API record contains no state field, so state is left null. Dimension qualifier is 'trimmed to', so 142 x 110 mm is the trimmed sheet.
How to read this record
Every field above is transcribed from the holding institution’s own published record, in the institution’s own words. Nothing has been normalised, converted or reconciled — where a record is internally inconsistent, or disagrees with another institution, the inconsistency is preserved, because it is data about the state of cataloguing for this plate rather than noise to be tidied away.
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