At the time this portrait was made, Lieven van Coppenol was in poor health, having suffered from an attack of insanity that forced him to give up his position as the head of the French school in Amsterdam and focus solely on calligraphy. Pathologically vain, the calligrapher sent demonstrations of his penmanship to poets, often under printed likenesses of himself (as seen here), in the hopes of being commissioned to transcribe their odes. In this, Rembrandt van Rijn’s largest portrait etching, Van Coppenol holds a sheet of blank paper, likely meant as a formal element to bring light into the dark surroundings.