The Last Supper, after Leonardo da Vinci

When it was painted

In 1634 Rembrandt was twenty-eight. A few years after leaving his hometown of Leiden for Amsterdam, he had become one of the most sought-after portrait painters in the city. His 1632 group portrait, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, had made his name.

That June he married Saskia van Uylenburgh, a cousin of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, whose business Rembrandt worked with. The wedding took place in Saskia's home province of Friesland, in the north.

Rembrandt never went to Italy. The statesman Constantijn Huygens, who spotted his talent early, wrote that Rembrandt and his friend Jan Lievens said they were too busy for the trip, and that plenty of fine Italian painting could be seen in the Netherlands anyway. Instead, Rembrandt collected prints and paintings by Italian masters and studied how they built their scenes.

That is how he knew Leonardo's Last Supper, painted in the 1490s on the wall of the dining hall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. He never saw the mural itself, only prints made after it. Rembrandt made three drawings based on it, and this large red chalk sheet is one of them. Darker lines run over fainter ones, which shows that he went over it a second time and changed things as he went.

Hard years came later. Saskia died in 1642, and in 1656 Rembrandt, deep in debt, went bankrupt. This drawing traveled a long way before it came to The Met in 1975 with the Robert Lehman Collection.

Now look along the bottom edge, toward the right. There is Rembrandt's signature, scrawled in red chalk. On a copy of another painter's mural, he still put his own name.