Filosofo in meditazione

Rembrandt signed and dated this small panel 1632, the year he left his home town of Leiden for Amsterdam and the busy portrait trade that would make his name. An old man sits by a tall window in a room built around a great stone spiral stair that winds up into shadow, and the light spilling from the window and the low fire does most of the work of the picture. For a long stretch of the 20th century, specialists doubted it was even his, striking it from the accepted list before later study of the underdrawing and paint brought it firmly back to Rembrandt. The old title stuck, though the scene is probably not a philosopher at all but the blind Tobit and his wife Anna from the Bible, waiting by the window for their son to come home.