Head of an Old Man in a Cap

At the end of the 1620s Rembrandt was in his early twenties and still working in Leiden, the town where he was born, sharing ground with another young painter, Jan Lievens. The two of them turned out heads like this one by the dozen. Nobody here is a client sitting for a likeness. These are tronies, studies of a type, an old man, a soldier, painted to be sold as pictures in their own right. The panel is small, about 24 centimetres high. The paint is laid on thick and unblended, and the hairs of the eyebrows are scratched into it with the sharp end of the brush handle. In the upper corner is the monogram RHL, for Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden, which he used before he was known well enough to sign with one name. The panel reached Kingston in 2003 as a gift from Alfred and Isabel Bader. He had arrived in Canada in 1940 as an interned refugee from Vienna, studied chemistry at Queen's University in the same town, and spent a later fortune on Dutch painting.