Landscape with a seven arched bridge

For decades this hung under a cloud. In 1989 scholars decided it was not a Rembrandt at all but the work of his pupil Govert Flinck, a later copy of a composition now in Amsterdam. Then in 2022 tree-ring dating of the oak panel showed the Berlin picture was the earlier of the two, which meant it could not be the copy, and the name Rembrandt went back on. It fits what he did with landscape anyway. Rembrandt rarely painted the countryside from life; these river scenes with their stone bridge of seven arches, moored boats and lone angler were largely invented in the studio, dark and stormy stage sets more than records of a real place. The light breaks through low on one side, the way it does in his etchings of the flat land around Amsterdam.