Tronie d'un jeune homme au hausse-col et au béret

For a long time this counted as one of Rembrandt's own faces, one of more than 40 self-portraits he was thought to have left behind. The look is right for the 1630s, when he was young and newly successful in Amsterdam and turning out these tronies by the dozen, not portraits of anyone in particular but studies of a type, here a soldier in a steel gorget and a soft beret. A recent cleaning at the Uffizi found a signature hidden under old varnish. Yet the Rembrandt Research Project, the scholars who spent decades sorting his hand from his pupils', now doubt he painted much of it at all, and suspect a canvas he began was finished by someone else. Whether the face was ever meant to be his own is the part they doubt most.