Portrait of a Young Man in an Armchair

George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, bought this portrait in April 1911, after the Berlin museum director Wilhelm von Bode, the leading Rembrandt expert of his day, had examined it. It was the first old master in his collection, and he fretted over it for years. An X-ray taken for a 1930 exhibition confirmed one of his worries. The hands, folded over the arm of the chair, had been repainted. On a January night in 1968 three men stayed behind after a film screening at the Eastman House museum, took the canvas and left through a window. State police arrested them that October at a small airport near Plattsburgh, about to fly the rolled-up painting to Canada, and after the theft it moved to the Memorial Art Gallery. In 1989 members of the Rembrandt Research Project, the Dutch team that pared down his accepted work, wrote that it was unlikely ever to convince them. The museum still lists it as a Rembrandt, and in 2019 it had the canvas imaged and scanned to look again at how it was made.