Young Man in Oriental Costume

Between 1803 and 1914 this big canvas went through the London and New York trade again and again, and every time it was sold as a Rembrandt. Its title changed far more often than its attribution. At Christie's in 1803 it was a Portrait of a Turkish Nobleman and went for about £136. In 1850 the same auction house listed it as A Man in an Oriental Dress and Turban. At a London sale in 1909 it became a Portrait of an Oriental Prince and fetched £714, and when a New York dealer sold it to Maria Antoinette Evans of Boston in 1914, it was called The Young Samson. Mrs Evans, the widow of the businessman Robert Dawson Evans, left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1917. Later scholarship took it away from Rembrandt altogether. The museum now catalogues it as the work of an unidentified follower of Ferdinand Bol, one of Rembrandt's pupils, a name that appears in none of those sale records.