Evangelist Writing

In February 1927 John Ringling, the circus owner who was then building an art museum of his own in Sarasota, Florida, paid 78,000 dollars for this canvas at a New York auction, buying it as a Rembrandt. It had a respectable record. The standard catalogues of Rembrandt's paintings published in 1909, 1916 and 1935 all included it. Ringling died in 1936, and in 1939 the Museum of Fine Arts bought the picture from his estate for 85,000 dollars. The museum no longer calls it Rembrandt's. It catalogues the evangelist at his writing as the work of an unnamed painter from Rembrandt's circle, close to him in time and manner, and it describes the signature at the centre right, Rembrandt f. 16, as false. The rest of the date is gone, because at some point the canvas was cut down straight through it.