Homme barbu au bonnet

Rembrandt painted this head around 1657, during the worst years of his life. He had been declared insolvent the year before, and his fine house in Amsterdam, along with the art collection he loved, was being sold off to satisfy his creditors. It is not a portrait of a particular sitter but a tronie, a study of a type worked up from a live model, with the light and the brush concentrated on the eyes and the divided beard while the clothes are barely sketched in. For a long time it was called 'A Jewish Rabbi', a title first recorded only in 1844, with no real evidence behind it. The National Gallery in London bought the picture under that name.