Vecchio in costume militare

Rembrandt was in his mid-twenties in Leiden when he painted this old man in a gorget and plumed cap, one of the character heads, or tronies, he turned out to practise faces and costumes rather than to portray a particular sitter. The real surprise is underneath. Since a first X-ray in 1968, and in far sharper detail after recent scans at the Getty that map the metals in the paint, we know there is a second figure hidden below, a younger man in a cloak, painted the other way up. Good oak panel was expensive, so Rembrandt simply turned the board around and started again. Who the young man was, and why he was painted out, nobody has settled. On the surface, the old soldier stares off past your shoulder, lit from the left.