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Up close, you can see how Rembrandt’s application of wet paint over dry creates a texture, or scumble, uncannily close to human skin, with its pores and subcutaneous blood vessels.

We see an arch, then he rubs his wet cloth around it and scumbles of blue appear, then a farmhouse, almond green feathery strokes of what may be a tree.

With scumbles he completed the colour and the modelling.

Across the surface, gossamer scumbles of paint proceed, appropriately, without a care, rising into the pale greens of the trees.

It is perhaps owing partly to patina on the old glass, which "scumbles" it; but I have myself sometimes succeeded in getting the same >effect by using yellow-stain on pure white glass.