Portrait de Marten Looten

In January 1632 Rembrandt was 25, newly moved from Leiden to Amsterdam, and taking portrait commissions as fast as they came. He put the date of this one in an odd place, on the letter the sitter is holding, together with the man's name and the monogram RHL, the initials he had used back in Leiden. The rest of the writing on that sheet is not writing at all, only a convincing-looking script, and when scholars tried to read it in the 1930s the argument ran for two years.

Marten Looten was a Mennonite grain merchant and a wealthy one. Rembrandt caught him glancing up from the letter with his lips parted, as though someone had just walked in. Three centuries later J. Paul Getty bought the panel, the first Rembrandt to go to a Southern Californian, and gave it away to the county museum long before he had a museum of his own.