The Scholar at the Lectern
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669) · 1641
An old man in a dark robe and a black cap sits at a lectern, one hand on an open book, his face turned towards you as if you had interrupted his reading. The light falls on his forehead and his white beard and leaves the rest of the room in shadow. Rembrandt painted him in sixteen forty one, the same year as the Girl in a Picture Frame beside it, and on a panel of almost exactly the same size, so the two have long been shown as a pair: youth and age, a woman and a man, a joke and a meditation.
Look at the face. The skin is built up in small touches of ochre, pink and grey, with the wrinkles around the eyes drawn in thin dark lines, and the beard is a tangle of loose strokes that read as soft hair from a few steps back. The hand on the book, by contrast, is barely more than a shape. This selective finish, sharp where the meaning is and loose everywhere else, is what Rembrandt's contemporaries admired and what later painters tried to learn from him. The sitter is probably not a real scholar but a model dressed in the kind of costume the artist kept in his studio, and the painting was perhaps meant as a character study, a tronie, rather than a portrait.
Like its companion, the panel belonged to Stanisław August, was sold after his death and bought by Kazimierz Rzewuski in eighteen fifteen, and passed to the Lanckoroński family. During the Second World War the family's Vienna collection was seized, and the two Rembrandts spent decades in a bank vault in Switzerland before Karolina Lanckorońska gave them to the rebuilt castle in nineteen ninety four. Some scholars once doubted the attribution, but the Rembrandt Research Project accepted both paintings as authentic in two thousand and six.
Did You Know? The two Rembrandts were long doubted, and it was only in two thousand and six that experts confirmed that both are by the master's own hand.
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