Manner of Rembrandt | Young Woman with a Red Necklace, 1645

The same model appears in "Study of a Young Girl" (formerly marquis de Pontalba, Senlis; later Jane Taft Ingalls, Cleveland; current whereabouts unknown), and possibly also in "Young Woman at an Open Half-Door" (Art Institute of Chicago), attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten.

The picture is also closely related to "A Woman Weeping" (Detroit Institute of Arts), assigned to the circle of Rembrandt.

In the 1950s, when this small panel was in the well-known collection of Sidney van den Bergh, it was frequently exhibited as a Rembrandt, as it had been in the celebrated Amsterdam exhibition of 1898.

The picture was rarely seen by scholars between its sale in 1979 and 2005, when its inclusion in the Markus bequest made it accessible within a collection of works by Rembrandt pupils and followers, including at least three other examples of study heads: the Study Head of an Old Man, which dates from the 1630s, and the Man in a Red Cloak and the Head of Christ, both of which are probably from the 1650s.

None of these broadly comparable pictures can be said to approach the Markus panel in condition and quality.

Van Dyke was the first scholar to remove the work from the canon and assign it to a pupil.

The attribution to Rembrandt was maintained by other cataloguers until the 1960s, when De Vries, followed by Bauch and Sumowski, assigned the study to Carel Fabritius (1622-1654).

The present state of scholarship tends to discourage attributions to specific artists, who were in many instances simultaneously imitating Rembrandt's manner, gradually forming their own, and responding to fellow students (assuming the work in question came from Rembrandt's workshop). | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art