Old Man at the Window

An old man looks out through a window with a carved stone surround, all of it painted in minute detail, the kind of eye-fooling picture Hoogstraten liked best. He signed it with his initials and dated it 1653, during his stay in Vienna, and it has been in the imperial collection ever since. For a long time the old man was said to be Yom Tov Lipmann Heller, a famous rabbi who had led Vienna's Jewish community in the 1620s, and the same story credited him with winning Jews the right to live on the island across the Danube Canal. The museum thinks the identification is probably wrong. The quarter on that island, then called the Unterer Werd, had held a Jewish settlement since 1625. In 1670 Emperor Leopold I expelled its residents, and the district was renamed Leopoldstadt in his honour, the name it still has.