Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669)

Although traditionally identified as Rembrandt's pupil Ferdinand Bol, in 1974 the former keeper of the Amsterdam Print Cabinet in the Rijksmuseum, Mrs. D. de Hoop-Scheffer, published a seventeenth-century inscription on the reverse of an impression in which the man is identified as Petrus Sylvius (1610-1653). The son of the Reformed preacher Jan Cornelius Sylvius who conducted the marriage ceremony between Rembrandt and Saskia van Uylenburgh and whom Rembrandt etched on two occasions (Bartsch 266; and 284), Petrus, like his father, became a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. It has been suggested that Rembrandt made the portrait to celebrate this occasion.