Pilate Washing His Hands

The picture reached the Metropolitan in 1913 with the bequest of Benjamin Altman, the New York department store owner, and at that point it was a Rembrandt. Wilhelm von Bode, then the leading authority on him, had published it in 1905, though even Bode called it a somewhat abnormal work. From the 1940s onward scholars moved it away from the master and gave it to an unnamed pupil painting in the 1660s, which is how the museum lists it now, as style of Rembrandt. Aert de Gelder, the only pupil known to have been with Rembrandt in that decade, has been suggested, with nothing to confirm it. Pilate sits in a wide black hat while a boy pours water over his hands into a shallow basin, and the guards and their pikes stay back in the dark.