Seated old man with a cane in fanciful costume

In July 1930 the oil businessman Calouste Gulbenkian sent a long memorandum to the head of the Soviet state bank. Objects that had sat in Russia's museums for many years, he argued, should not be sold, because they were a national inheritance. If they were going to be sold anyway, he added, he wanted first refusal at equal prices. That October this old man with his stick left the Hermitage in Leningrad for Gulbenkian's collection, the last of his four purchases from the museum. The canvas had reached Saint Petersburg in 1772, when Catherine the Great bought the Paris collection of the Crozat family. Rembrandt painted it in 1645 as a tronie, a character figure made without a sitter's commission, dressing his model in props from his studio. The museum in Lisbon thinks it may have served as the model for other versions of the same composition.