Self-Portrait in the Year Bread Withdrew

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He painted himself in the year when the tulips failed and the bread lines grew longer than the canals.

The studio was cold. Not dramatically cold—no frost on the walls, no heroic icicles—but the kind of cold that lives in the joints and hollows out the belly. He had sold the last of his silver brushes two weeks earlier and now worked with a chewed stick wrapped in linen, its tip stiffened with oil and soot. The mirror was cracked, bought cheap from a sailor who claimed it had survived a storm off Texel. The crack ran from forehead to chin, splitting him neatly into two men: the painter who still believed, and the body that no longer did.

He sat as the image shows him: one leg drawn up, the other slack, ribs counting themselves beneath the skin. The river behind him was imagined—memory standing in for geography—because water, at least, still knew how to flow. He had not eaten since yesterday morning, and even then it had been a crust softened in ditch water. Hunger made his hands tremble, but it also sharpened his eye. He noticed everything: the greenish bruise under the eye, the way the clavicle rose like a ridge of chalk, the humiliating delicacy of his own wrists.

In Amsterdam they wanted sheen—silk merchants, militia captains, wives painted fuller than truth. No one wanted this: a man undone by attention, by too much looking inward. Yet he painted it anyway, because starvation had stripped him of negotiation. There was nothing left to flatter.

He worked slowly, stopping often, not from fatigue but from doubt. Was this still art, or merely evidence? Each stroke felt like a confession he could not take back. When the light failed, he leaned the painting against the wall and lay on the floor beside it, as if the canvas might share its warmth.

Years later, when grain ships returned and his name briefly circulated again, someone would call this self-portrait “unsparing.” Another would say “unmarketable.” He would say nothing. He had already said everything then—when hunger had taught him what the body knows long before the mind agrees: that to endure is not heroic, but precise.