Suffer little children to come unto me

In 2014 this large biblical scene sold at auction in Cologne as an anonymous Netherlandish School picture. The Amsterdam dealer Jan Six then argued it was an early Rembrandt, painted in Leiden around 1627 when the artist was barely 21, and pointed to a small figure in white at the upper right that he read as Rembrandt's own face. The attribution is not simple. Rembrandt seems to have begun the canvas and left it unfinished, and a later, weaker hand completed it. Recent cleaning stripped that overpaint away and uncovered the original beneath, including a bearded man whose plain Dutch cap had been painted over a turban, and a child first shown naked and later given clothes by the correcting hand.