Portrait of a Man in Profile

Around 1637 Govert Flinck had just left Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio and set up on his own, yet he kept painting so completely in his teacher's manner that the two hands are still hard to tell apart. That closeness had a strange afterlife. Flinck's pictures passed for Rembrandt's so easily that dealers sometimes scraped off his signature and added the more valuable name, which is part of why a small head like this one still carries only an 'attributed to.' It was long called a portrait of a Jew in profile. The collection that owns it now uses the plainer title, a man seen from the side. It is a small panel, barely 20 centimetres tall, the study of a face and the fall of light more than a commissioned likeness.