Patient inconscient (Allégorie de l'odorat)

When Rembrandt painted this he was about 18 and still in his hometown of Leiden, learning his trade. It belongs to a set of the Five Senses, and for smell he chose an odd, grim scene, a man slumped unconscious while someone waves a reviving vial under his nose, the sort of thing you might have seen the year the plague came through Leiden, in 1624. For centuries the picture was lost. In 2015 it surfaced at a New Jersey estate sale, listed as an anonymous 19th-century work and found tucked under a ping-pong table, and it sold for over a million dollars once someone recognised the young Rembrandt's hand. His earliest known signature was later found hidden inside it, on a scrap of drawing pinned to the wall.