Self-portrait wearing a Hat and two Chains

A gold chain was the usual present from a prince to a painter he had decided to honour. No document shows Rembrandt ever being given one, and he wears two of them here over a plain dark coat, the sort of prop he kept in the studio and put on for several self-portraits. He painted the panel in Amsterdam around 1642, the year The Night Watch was delivered and the year his wife Saskia died. When the Thyssen collection bought it in 1976, the art historian Horst Gerson doubted it was Rembrandt's work at all. X-rays, pigment analysis and tree-ring dating of the oak, carried out between 1987 and 1994, tied the panel to others he had used, and the Rembrandt Research Project came down on the side of the attribution without reservation.