Raising of the Cross

This small oil sketch has spent a century being argued over. Abraham Bredius, the Dutch scholar whose house in The Hague still holds it, bought it in 1921 convinced it was a Rembrandt. Later experts, including the Rembrandt Research Project, found the rough, hasty brushwork too weak for the master and set it down as a follower's copy, and it kept that lesser label for most of the century. Then in 2021 the art historian Jeroen Giltaij made the case for Rembrandt again. Two things fed the new argument. The panel's wood was dated by its rings to no earlier than 1642, and under the paint lie changes the artist made as he worked, which a copyist would have had no reason to make. Specialists at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam came round to the attribution, though others still hold back. The museum shows it today without settling the question.