Die Verleugnung des Petrus

Rembrandt painted this in 1660, in his final decade, when the fashionable Amsterdam commissions had largely dried up and he was living in reduced circumstances. It shows a moment from the night of Christ's arrest. Peter, who has followed at a distance, is cornered by a servant girl holding up a candle, and soldiers press in to ask if he is one of the prisoner's men. Peter, in white, lifts a hand and denies it, the third of the three denials Christ had foretold. The whole scene is built around that one candle flame, which the girl half shields with her hand so the light falls on Peter's worried face. Far back on the right, barely lit, Christ is being led away and turns his head to look back. A century later the painting was sold to Catherine the Great and hung for generations in Russia before returning to Amsterdam.