Bust of an old woman in a white cap

Rembrandt made this around 1640, at the height of his Amsterdam portrait practice, though nobody commissioned it. It is a study on a single oak plank of a woman whose flat plain collar marks her out as a servant, and what he is working on is the light, which comes from behind her head and grazes the side of her face. Later owners wanted something grander. A restorer painted fur over the collar and added strips of wood to square the panel up into a formal portrait. In 1936 Abraham Bredius, the leading Rembrandt authority of his day, dropped the picture from his catalogue. Cleaning between 2003 and 2005 took the additions off again, and Ernst van de Wetering, who ran the long Rembrandt Research Project, accepted it back. Dendrochronology matched its oak to three other pictures from the workshop, all cut from one tree.