Responses to Rembrandt

Book excerpt: In 1968, a group of Dutch scholars known as the Rembrandt Research Project, feeling that the master's oeuvre was inflated, began to take Rembrandt to task. The group's members traveled around the world, subjecting Rembrandt to intense scrutiny: they x-rayed paintings; examined the rendering of lace, hands, and signatures; counted threads of warp and woof. Paintings long considered Rembrandts started to fall. Then, in 1984, one of the members of the Project suggested, in print, that The Polish Rider might be next. Perhaps this painting, "one of the world's masterpieces," wasn't a Rembrandt after all but the work of a lesser-known pupil, Willem Drost.