The Polish Rider is a seventeenth century painting, usually dated to the 1650s, of a young man traveling on horseback through a murky landscape, now in the Frick Collection in New York. When the painting was bought by Henry Frick in 1910, there was consensus that the work was by the Dutch painter Rembrandt. This attribution has since been contested, though this remains a minority view. There has also been debate over whether the painting was intended as a portrait of a particular person, living or historical, and if so of whom, or if not, what it was intended to represent. The quality of the... painting is generally admitted as is its slight air of mystery. though parts of the background are very sketchily painted or unfinished. The first western scholar to discuss the painting was Wilhelm von Bode who in his History of Dutch Painting stated that it was a Rembrandt dating from his "late" period, that is, 1654. Somewhat later, Abraham Bredius examined the picture quite closely and had no doubts that its author was Rembrandt.
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