This atmospheric painting shows a lonely figure seated in front of a huge volume open on the table before him. He has closed one of the window shutters, but brilliant sunlight floods through the others and onto the wall.
Much of the image’s power lies not just in the dramatic tension between light and dark, but in the way the artist has used thick white paint and grey detailing to capture the refraction and reflection of light by the glass. This contrasts subtly with the clear light which pours in through the open window below the glazed ones. In the deep shadows beyond these highlights we can make out shelves of books and two globes mounted on the wall above them. This is a library and so the man at the table must be a scholar searching in the gloom for enlightenment.
But while it is highly evocative, this painting has also proved controversial. When bought by the National Gallery in 1917 it was described as ‘A Philosopher, by Rembrandt’ and was believed to be an important early work dating to about 1628–9. Now it has a different, much more neutral, title and is no longer thought to be by him. Why the change?
The question of attribution to a single artist is always somewhat problematic. Many paintings signed by a single artist who, like Rembrandt, ran a busy workshop, would have been made with at least some help from assistants (though in this case the painting’s small size makes that less likely). Over the last few decades many paintings once attributed to Rembrandt have come under scrutiny and been reattributed as predominantly the work of his studio assistants, or as works by contemporary followers or later forgers.
Close examination of this painting has thrown up some inconsistencies which, though not enough to disprove Rembrandt’s authorship altogether, have cast significant doubt on it. Most of this evidence is based on very detailed examination of the brushstrokes, the unusual way that lines have been incised in the paint (look at the outlines around the hinges of the open shutter in the window jambs) and the rather rough way the figure has been depicted. The method used to join the boards on which the work is painted is one which has not been documented before in a Rembrandt work. True, there is an extremely faint ‘Rembrandt’ signature in the right foreground of this painting, but this is generally accepted as a later, fraudulent addition, and since Rembrandt didn’t always sign his paintings, it doesn’t prove anything either way.
Whoever the artist in this case, the style and subject matter is consistent with Rembrandt’s early work of 1625–31, before he moved to Amsterdam from his home town of Leiden. The image of a melancholic scholar, philosopher or scientist lost in thought was a popular one at the time, but it was not a subject which Rembrandt painted after 1631. Scientific dating of the wooden panels suggests that they are consistent with this period and analysis of some of the paint suggests that it was made and used in a similar way to Rembrandt’s usual practice. So it seems highly likely that this painting was made by an artist who had at least some familiarity with his workshop, subject matter and techniques.
