Carel Fabritius, 'Young Man in a Fur Cap', 1654

This portrait is one of Carel Fabritius’s final works, made in the last year of his short life – he died aged just 32. He was apprenticed to Rembrandt in Amsterdam between 1641 and 1643 and is generally considered one of his most talented pupils, but only about a dozen of his paintings survive.

Although it is impossible to be sure – no documented likeness of Fabritius exists – it is almost certainly a self portrait. The intensity of the gaze and the posture are reminiscent of a series of earlier self portraits made by Rembrandt and his other pupils. The costume he wears, including a soldier’s breastplate, also fits in with this tradition: Rembrandt, for example, painted himself as a soldier in the 1630s.

One intriguing aspect is the hat. The title, which would have been given to the painting long after it was made, describes it as fur, but the curls depicted in the rather obscure paintwork make it look more like wool. It’s possible that it had flaps which came down around the ears and neck – a type of hat worn by sailors, and possibly soldiers – but it is too ill-defined to be sure.

The fact that it was a self portrait probably wasn’t always considered important at the time. Self portraits of famous artists, such as Rembrandt, were collected by connoisseurs, but images of types or characters in different professions, known as tronies, were also popular and artists would use themselves as models. Fabritius may well have been painting for this market and would have also no doubt found the discipline of painting himself useful practice. It allowed him to develop his technique and experiment with different effects, materials and facial expressions.

Ten years after he had left Rembrandt’s studio, Fabritius was definitely developing his own style. This painting uses a brighter palette of colours and less dramatic lighting effects than those he had learned in Amsterdam. Instead of looming out of a deep, dark background – like those we see in Rembrandt’s work, including Self Portrait at the Age of 63 – Fabritius has here set himself against a bright but cloudy sky. This is a very unusual backdrop and it creates its own sense of drama, especially because of our low viewpoint (we are slightly below the man, rather than on his level).

It may be that this use of lighter colours and a more airy atmosphere shows the influence of other artists in Delft where Fabritius had moved from Amsterdam in 1650. It was a move which had tragic consequences. On 12 October 1654, the same year that he made this painting, one of the gunpowder stores accidentally detonated and flattened a large part of the city, including the studio where he was working. Fabritius was pulled alive from the rubble but died of his injuries, and it is assumed that many of his pictures were destroyed. The scene of devastation was recorded in a painting by Egbert van der Poel, A View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654.