Portrait of an Old Woman (Prophetess Hannah)

The walking stick and the fringed prayer shawl mark this old woman as Hannah, the aged prophetess who, in the Gospel of Luke, recognised the infant Jesus when he was brought to the temple. The panel is cut to an oval and carries the date 1639. By then Rembrandt was running a busy studio in Amsterdam, where pupils learned the trade partly by copying his pictures, and that is exactly where the questions about this one begin. The paint is thin, almost transparent, quite unlike the way Rembrandt usually built up a face. The Kunsthistorisches Museum still lists it under his name, suggesting he painted it around 1635 and it was reworked in the workshop, yet its own description also calls it probably a copy of a lost Rembrandt by Govert Flinck, a pupil who worked alongside him in those years. The panel has been in Vienna since 1772, when it was brought from the castle at Pressburg, today's Bratislava.