Gleichnis von den Arbeitern im Weinberg

In 1637 Rembrandt was riding high in Amsterdam, newly married, in demand, running a busy workshop. On this small oak panel, barely bigger than a sheet of paper, he took up Christ's parable of the vineyard. A landowner hires labourers through the day, then pays the latecomers the same as those who had sweated since dawn, and the early workers protest. Rembrandt sets it in a shadowed room. The master sits at a table telling out coins by lamplight while a worker leans in and argues, hand thrown out toward the money. He never quite finished the picture. It came to the Hermitage in 1772, bought with the Paris collection of a French baron, Crozat de Thiers, and it has stayed in Saint Petersburg since.