Ritratto di Titus van Rijn

In July 1656 Rembrandt was declared insolvent and his possessions went to auction. This portrait of his son Titus comes from about a year later, when the boy was 16. Within months Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels, the woman who ran Rembrandt's household, set themselves up as art dealers and took him on as their employee, an arrangement that let him keep working while his creditors had no claim on what he earned. Titus sits in a red beret and a costume a century out of date, Venetian in style, the kind of studio dressing-up his father liked. When the Wallace Collection passed to the nation in 1897 it held twelve paintings under Rembrandt's name, and this is the one whose attribution has never been challenged.