Bildnis des Floris Soop

The flag over his shoulder, the plumed hat and the tooled leather sword-belt all mark this man out as an ensign, the standard-bearer of one of Amsterdam's civic guard companies. In the 1650s that was a role kept for well-off young bachelors, and the sitter is almost certainly Floris Soop, a rich Amsterdammer who himself owned around 140 paintings. Rembrandt gives him a brooding, half-lit presence rather than any parade-ground swagger. The canvas has darkened and worn with the centuries, and scholars still argue over how much of it Rembrandt painted with his own brush and how much fell to his workshop. A hundred years on it hung in London, in the collection of the painter Joshua Reynolds.