Portrait of a Young Man with a Golden Chain

Signed and dated 1635, this shows a young man in a plumed beret and a heavy gold chain, painted when Rembrandt was in his late twenties, newly arrived in Amsterdam and suddenly in demand. He loved this kind of dressing-up. The gold chain was an old mark of honour, a thing granted to esteemed painters, and for a long time people took the sitter to be Rembrandt himself in costume. The face is lit the way he liked, one side glowing out of a brown dark. There is an argument about it, though. In 1989 a team of Dutch experts judged the hand to be not Rembrandt's own but someone close to him in the studio, while other scholars still defend it as his. Old prints made of it in the 1700s are all lettered, Rembrandt painted this.