Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son shows a father forgiving a son who wasted everything and came home in rags. It illustrates a parable from the Gospel of Luke, and Rembrandt painted it in the last years of his life, after bankruptcy and the deaths of most of the people he loved.
The son kneels with his head shaved and his back to the viewer. An old man in a red cloak bends over him and rests both hands on his shoulders. Nothing in the room moves.
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In the Gospel, the father does not wait for his son to reach the door. "When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." That is Luke 15:20.
Rembrandt's father does not run. He stands in place, bent forward over a kneeling man. The Hermitage, which owns the canvas, says the old man "is blinded by tears as he forgives his son."
The most famous moment of the story is missing from the most famous painting of it. Rembrandt had etched the scene as early as 1636, so he knew how it went. At the end of his life he painted the second after.
What happens after the father runs?
The embrace. Luke gives it one line, and Rembrandt gives it a canvas 103 inches tall with two figures at the center and almost nothing else. The running is over. The son is already on his knees, and the father's hands have already landed.
On the road home, the son rehearses a speech: "make me as one of thy hired servants." That is Luke 15:19. The painting shows no speech. It shows the moment the speech stops mattering.
Rembrandt had returned to this story for decades. His first version was a 1636 etching that borrowed from a woodcut by Martin van Heemskerck, and a drawing followed in 1642. He left no note explaining why the late canvas is so still. The son, at least, still wears the proof of where he has been.
What You'll Discover
What the son has left.
Who stands watching on the right.
Why the father's hands differ.
Whose story Rembrandt was telling.