Tobia e Anna con il capretto

Rembrandt signed and dated this in 1626, the year he turned 20 and was still working in his home town of Leiden. It draws on an old story from the Book of Tobit. Tobit has gone blind, and his wife Anna keeps them from poverty by taking in weaving. One day she is paid with a young goat, and hearing it bleat in the house, the blind old man leaps to the conclusion that she has stolen it and scolds her. Anna, stung, snaps back. Rembrandt fills the little panel with the clutter of a poor household and reads every line of the couple's faces. One historian called it his first truly accomplished painting.