Rembrandt (1606–1669) as a Young Man

In the autumn of 1909 New York spent weeks celebrating Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton, and the Metropolitan marked the occasion with a large loan show of Dutch paintings pulled out of American collections. This panel hung in it as number 74, catalogued as Rembrandt's portrait of himself, lent by J. Pierpont Morgan, who had bought it that same year out of the collection of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. It is a small thing, about 22 centimetres tall, and it carries the monogram RL at the right edge.

The attribution came apart slowly. Horst Gerson was unconvinced in 1969, the Rembrandt Research Project called it an imitation in 1982, and the museum put it into its own exhibition of 1995, Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt. The record now reads style of Rembrandt, painted by someone close to him around 1630 to 1635. An old photograph kept in The Hague shows a copy of it on panel, whereabouts unknown.