Un vieux savant près d'une fenêtre dans une salle voûtée

An old man reading alone in a high vaulted room, daylight from a window on one side and a fainter light from a doorway on the other, was a Leiden speciality around 1631. Rembrandt was 25 that year, still working in the town where he was born and a few months from moving to Amsterdam for good, and the painters around him turned out several rooms like this one.

Stockholm's version was long counted among his best, and it carried a title to match, Saint Anastasius, naming the reader as one of the church fathers at his desk. Both halves have come loose. The reader is no longer identified as Anastasius, and the Nationalmuseum's own catalogue text says the picture is now thought to be by another hand, while the artist field on the same record still reads Rembrandt.

It is signed and dated 1631, it came to the museum in 1866 from the old royal collection, and it hangs in the 17th-century room.