Portrait of an Old Man in Red

Nobody knows who the old man is. Rembrandt painted him at least twice, here and in the picture in London where the same face sits in an armchair, and through the early 1650s he produced a run of these life-size portraits of the elderly in which the hands carry as much of the sitter as the face does. The canvas reached Russia in 1769 through Saxon misfortune. Count Heinrich von Brühl had been first minister to Augustus III in Dresden and had assembled one of the largest private galleries in Europe while Saxony was being ruined in the Seven Years' War. He died in 1763. Six years later his heirs sold around 600 paintings to Catherine II, who was buying entire collections at a time to stock the Hermitage, and this was among them. It has been in Saint Petersburg ever since.