In his introduction David Bulter remarks: "Standing in front of one of the late portraits, it strikes one that Rembrandt became a truly great artist when first he realised that Art need not be a mirror to gaze into, but a mirror to peer out from. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was the first poet to have elaborated at any length upon this realisation, and this is what makes him our contemporary. Unconcerned with cultivating a public 'persona' (the etymology of his family name), Pessoa wrote into being a heteronymic hall of mirrors from which the myriad image staring out despairs of finding the man who supposedly gave rise to it".