Cristo con il bastone

This gentle, plainly dressed figure of Christ leaning on a staff was painted in Amsterdam around 1661, and for a long time it carried Rembrandt's own name. The soft, human way it imagines Jesus — no halo, no glory, just a tired man — is very much Rembrandt's late idea of sacred painting, worked out from live studies of a young Jewish sitter in his neighborhood. But the museum now lists it as the work of a follower. Scholars point out that the broad, almost decorative handling imitates Rembrandt's rough surfaces without quite catching his depth and weight, and a few have wondered whether it came from Arent de Gelder, his last important pupil. No firm name has replaced Rembrandt's.