Саул и Давид

This shows the moment in the Book of Samuel when the young David plays the harp to soothe King Saul, and the old king, tormented and jealous, wipes his eyes with a curtain while his hand rests near a spear. For most of the 20th century you could not have called it a Rembrandt with confidence. In 1969 the leading Rembrandt scholar Horst Gerson struck it off the list, saying he could not feel Rembrandt's hand in it. Part of the problem was the painting itself. It had been cut into pieces at some point, rejoined, and heavily overpainted in past restorations, so nobody was sure how much of the surface was original. The Mauritshuis then spent about eight years studying it with an international team, peeling back the later paint and imaging what lay beneath. In 2015 they announced their verdict: it is Rembrandt, worked in two campaigns across the 1650s.