Agnes Boyd was the daughter of a Kirkcudbright customs officer, and married David Geddes, Deputy-Auditor of Excise for Scotland, in 1780. As the only son of this marriage, Andrew Geddes was evidently devoted to his mother who sat in 1812 for one of the first of his ‘small whole-lengths’ that he painted in Edinburgh, following his temporary return from London. In 1813 he was to pay her the ultimate compliment of portraying her in the style of Rembrandt and, conceivably, in the guise of Rembrandt’s mother. His compositional and conceptual model was the celebrated picture in the Royal Collection which was then still revered as a portrait of Rembrandt’s mother (subsequently demoted to Portrait of an Old Woman). A year later, profiting from his recent move back to London, Geddes was to make his first documented investment in an outstanding Old Master painting – Rembrandt’s Toilet of Bathsheba (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). During the same period Geddes was to portray himself as a latter-day reincarnation of Rembrandt, both as a personal tribute to the supreme exponent of the art of self-portraiture and as an advertisement of his own artistic affiliation.