Ritratto di un vecchio

In Leiden around 1631 two young painters were working a few streets apart from the same elderly models. Lievens was 24, Rembrandt a year older, and the Dutch statesman Constantijn Huygens had just written both of them up, giving Lievens the bolder invention and Rembrandt the finer judgement. Heads like this were their shared exercise, an old face studied for its own sake rather than a commissioned likeness. For the beard Lievens brushed the grey in and then dragged the wooden end of the brush back through it while the paint was wet, scratching out the separate hairs. Within a year or two the two of them went different ways, Rembrandt to Amsterdam and Lievens to the court in London. The panel was in Catherine the Great's collection by the 1790s.