Young Woman with a Red Necklace

In September 1898 the Netherlands inaugurated an 18-year-old queen, and Amsterdam marked the occasion by borrowing every Rembrandt it could reach. The exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum ran from the 8th of September to the end of October and gathered well over a hundred paintings. This small panel was number 91 in it, lent by Baron Albert Oppenheim of Cologne, and it was shown there as a Rembrandt.

The name has been unsettled ever since. Abraham Bredius kept the picture under Rembrandt. Werner Sumowski gave it to Nicolaes Maes, who trained in Rembrandt's studio. Others have placed it in the workshop or the wider school, and the Metropolitan Museum now catalogues it as the work of an unnamed painter in Rembrandt's style, made around 1645.

It is a tiny thing, roughly 22 centimetres tall, and strips of wood were added along its edges by a later hand. It moved through salerooms in Berlin, Lucerne and London before Rita Markus left it to the museum in 2005.