Portrait of a Man Wearing a Black Hat

In December 1893 the widow of the Boston financier Frederick L. Ames, who had died that year, gave this panel and its companion to the Museum of Fine Arts, and they became the first paintings by Rembrandt to enter a Boston museum. Her husband had bought them from Cottier, a London and New York dealer, after they left the Paris collection of the Princesse de Sagan in 1889. The man's portrait is signed and dated at the lower right, Rembrandt, 1634, and still the signature has not settled who painted him. In 1986 the Rembrandt Research Project, the Dutch team that spent decades sorting the master's own pictures from his studio's, left the man out of the works it accepted and gave him to an unknown assistant. The museum keeps Rembrandt's name on both panels. Most scholars accept the woman as his, it says, while opinion on the man keeps moving back and forth. In 2018 both portraits were cleaned in a gallery where visitors could watch the conservator at work.