Old Man in Prayer

In April 1903 Whitworth Wallis, director of the city art gallery in Birmingham, wrote to the American painter Walter Gay, who was handling the sale, about this panel. He had no history for it, he admitted, beyond the fact that it had been shown to him the year before and came out of an old Worcestershire mansion, which he had been told was the Bishop's Palace. On that slender story the Museum of Fine Arts bought it that summer for 22,218 dollars, a large sum for a painting in 1903. Researchers have since tried to reach further back and have tentatively matched it with an old man's head by Rembrandt that was auctioned in London in 1775 from the collection of John Bertels. The museum no longer gives it to Rembrandt himself. It catalogues this old man at prayer as the work of an unnamed painter from Rembrandt's circle, close to him in time and manner. It is painted in oil on a wooden panel, a little over 75 centimetres tall.