Portrait of a Rabbi

In 1628 the young Rembrandt, still working in his home town of Leiden, drew in red chalk an old man sitting turned to the left, with a stick in his hands. The drawing seems to have stayed in use in his studio for years. Around 1645 to 1650 Salomon Koninck, who probably had some contact with that studio at the time, is thought to have taken the same pose and turned it into this painting. Specialists in Rembrandt's circle list it as a seated old man with a stick, while in Turin it is called a portrait of a rabbi. That name is a tradition. No document identifies the sitter, and Koninck often dressed his learned old men in exotic costume, sometimes with Jewish attributes. The painter's name has been questioned too. The German scholar Bernhard Schnackenburg proposed Jan Lievens, Rembrandt's friend from the Leiden years, a suggestion that David de Witt, a specialist in Rembrandt's circle, has called unconvincing.