Old scholar in a study

In the last months of the war the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest sent its best paintings west, hurriedly and badly packed, and this oak panel went with them. American officers logged it into the Munich Central Collecting Point, the Allied depot for displaced art in Bavaria, on 26 June 1945, and it stayed there until 20 December 1946, when the Hungarian holdings began going home. A good deal of that shipment came back damaged. Rembrandt had painted the panel in Amsterdam in 1642, an old man at a table with his books and a candlestick, the kind of study of an aged face that sold steadily in the Dutch Republic. Titles for pictures like this were usually supplied later by owners and dealers rather than by the painter, and Budapest has listed this one for generations as the Old Rabbi.