Self-portrait

This is not a picture of a man smoking a pipe, but a picture of a painting of a man smoking a pipe. In front of the painting-within-a-painting hangs a green curtain on a copper rail. It is so realistic you might even mistake it for a real curtain - in the seventeenth century it was not uncommon to protect paintings from strong light. Gerard Dou tried to trick the viewer into actually attempting to draw the curtain. Meanwhile the artist looks on: the man with the pipe in the window is Gerard Dou himself. (http://www.rijksmuseum.nl)