With his deeply furrowed brow, unsure expression and black shroud, the arrival of an old man in a cap is one of the most spectacular recent art events to take place at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

The university's Agnes Etherington Art Centre is unveiling the gift of a small painting by Rembrandt, long thought to be a portrait of his father, although historians are now undecided on that point.

Apparently, a sketch of Rembrandt's father looks somewhat like the gaunt, bearded man in the painting, but "then again, so do a lot of old men with beards," said centre director Janet Brooke.

More importantly, the Head of an Old Man in a Cap is only the fourth Rembrandt to be added to a Canadian museum's permanent collection and the first to come to Canada in 50 years, according to the centre's director. The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are also among the Rembrandt club.

But unlike the other Canadian Rembrandts, the Queen's University painting is more sullen. The Old Man is an example of Rembrandt's exercises in painting tronies, the Dutch word at the time for small portraits of anonymous people, conveying the psychology of the individual.

Painted by the artist when he was in his 20s, it taps into the confusion and dejection of old age, with the figure's downward glance and the kind of subtle play of dark and light contrasts, which any reader of a textbook on European art will instantly recognize as a characteristic of Rembrandt. It's also immediately apparent that every Hollywood cinematographer who has attempted mood lighting owes a direct debt.

"If you look at the image, I think you'll agree that it really is a moving image of old age. It's not a portrait of a person. It's a portrait of old age," Brooke said.

The small 8-inch by 10-inch painting was a gift of a long-time donor, retired chemical industry magnate Alfred Bader, who has maintained a strong connection with Queen's and its art gallery, as has his wife Isabel. Currently living in Milwaukee, Wis., Bader is a Queen's alumnus who had previously come to Canada from Vienna as a Jewish teenage refugee during the Second World War. When he later applied to universities, a number of them turned him down because they had quotas on how many Jewish students they could admit. Queen's did not have a quota.

Bader went on to earn degrees in chemical engineering and history at the university and later founded what is now the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich in the States, after which he began his long pursuit as an art collector -- apparently earning a reputation as the "chemist collector" -- as well as becoming a long-standing benefactor to Queen's.

"As his collection has grown and shaped over the years, he's developed a very, very, very tight focus on issues of Rembrandt and the Rembrandt school," Brooke said.

"They just speak to me," Bader said. But "there are many Dutch paintings I don't like. I don't like those peasant interiors, people smoking and drinking. I like the historical paintings and portraits, and of course Rembrandt to me was by far the greatest artist, and his students were very, very able."

Bader has donated more than 100 paintings and purchased another 20 or so for the gallery's Bader Collection of Dutch 17th-century art. Whatever is left of Bader's collection when he dies will also be given to the centre. He owns at least one other work by Rembrandt, he said.

An exhibition in Kingston based around the painting, including a number of 17th-century Dutch prints brought together to highlight the story behind the painting, opens tomorrow.