Portrait d'un homme au chapeau haut et aux gants

This portrait and its companion, a woman holding an ostrich-feather fan, hung for more than a century in the Yusupov palace in Saint Petersburg. A German traveller recorded seeing them there in 1803. Prince Felix Yusupov left Russia with the pair in 1919, settled in Paris, and then borrowed money from the American collector Joseph Widener with the two Rembrandts as security. He could not repay it. He sued in New York in 1927 to get them back and lost, and Widener kept them.

Nobody knows who the sitter was. One suggestion links him to a man in Rembrandt's group portrait of the Amsterdam cloth drapers, painted a few years later, though it stays a suggestion. The National Gallery of Art dates the picture to about 1656, which is the year Rembrandt declared himself insolvent and an inventory was drawn up of everything he owned.