Top athletes apply to Cirque du Soleil, but the director explains that a real artist needs more

He left behind no name, no biography, not even the smallest archive trace. Only two letters are known from the seventeenth-century master IS. This enigmatic contemporary of Rembrandt left behind a small oeuvre of finely painted faces, faces of ordinary people with traces of a hard life and sometimes also imperfections such as a skin disease or growth on the nose. “Who was he? Maybe a doctor or a medical student at Leiden University?”