Retrato de un anciano (posiblemente un rabino)

The title calls him a rabbi, but that is really a nineteenth-century guess that stuck. Rembrandt lived on the edge of Amsterdam's Jewish quarter and drew his neighbours there, so for a long time almost any bearded, sombre old man he painted ended up labelled a rabbi or a Jewish sage. The evidence here is thin, mostly the wide flat beret of the sort Ashkenazi Jews wore in the 1600s. Scholars now think only one of his portraits can be securely called a Jewish sitter. What is not in doubt is the painting itself, made in the 1650s, the face built up in warm, loaded strokes, the eyes set deep in shadow, an old man caught in a thought he does not share with us. Even the exact year stays open, placed loosely between 1645 and 1655.