Walter Kaufmann wrote that this painting ("Large Self-Portrait") "cast a spell" on him when he first saw it in the Vienna art museum, but it affected him even more in 1962 when he saw it again after visiting Poland and an afternoon spent at Auschwitz. He explained that Rembrandt had been 12 when the Thirty Years War began, and the painting was completed four years after the carnage of that war had ended. Kaufmann remarked that Rembrandt painted many self-portraits during his life, despite the fact that there was no market for them. But he painted them to provide a record of his evolution as an artist and as a human being. "Here was integrity incarnate," he said.
These thoughts and reminiscences are contained in Kaufmann's 1978 Preface to the Princeton paperback edition of his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy, a work that "certainly did not fail to impede my career," as he put it. He wrote the book (and its sequel, The Faith of a Heretic) because he felt that he had things to say--and was willing to say--that others did not and would not say.
His conclusion was that "humanists should be concerned less with the opinions of their peers and elders than with the challenge of Rembrandt's eyes."
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