人物のいる室内(La main chaude)

In 1896 the National Gallery of Ireland bought this small panel in London as the work of Willem de Poorter, a minor Dutch painter. Its own catalogue of 1914 called it a Rembrandt. In 1926 an English scholar reassigned it to Gerrit Dou, who had been Rembrandt's first pupil in Leiden, and the question stayed open for the rest of the century. The gallery settled on Rembrandt himself at the end of 2001.

He painted it in Leiden around 1628, at about 22, and scenes of ordinary people like this are rare in his work. The title comes from a parlour game, la main chaude, in which a player is struck from behind and has to name who did it. The gallery now doubts that a game is what is going on. It reads the man in the middle, glancing back over his shoulder, as someone who has just been caught out in front of the others.