Scholar at his desk

Rembrandt painted this small panel in 1641, near the top of his run in Amsterdam. He was the city's most sought-after portraitist, newly wealthy, a year away from finishing the huge militia piece we call the Night Watch and from losing his wife Saskia. The old scholar sits at his writing table in a wash of shadow, a shaft of light picking out his face and the papers under his hand. Its partner, a young woman leaning out of a painted frame, has hung beside it for centuries. The pair travelled together through Polish and Austrian hands, survived two world wars in private collections, and in 1994 the Lanckoroński family gave them to the Royal Castle in Warsaw, where they hang today.