The Polish Rider

A young man rides alone through a dim landscape, bow and arrows at his side, a fur-trimmed cap on his head, looking out at us as he passes. Rembrandt painted him around 1655, and almost everything about the picture is an open question. We do not know who the rider is meant to be, whether he is a real person, a soldier type, or a figure from a story, and scholars have proposed everyone from a Polish nobleman to a theologian. His eastern European costume gives the painting its traditional name. Even the hand behind it has been argued over. The Rembrandt Research Project once suggested a pupil finished parts of it, perhaps the horse's stiff legs, though most experts still read the conception and the rider's face as Rembrandt's own. When Henry Frick bought it in 1910, no one doubted it at all. It has stayed in his New York collection ever since, still riding out of a darkness the painter never explained.