[2] The presumed subject matter of philosophical meditation, the finely graded chiaroscuro treatment and the intricate composition were widely appreciated in France.

The catalogue gives the measurements of the panel and the description: Een Ordonnantie met Tobias, ende eenen drayenden Trap, door Rimbrant (A Composition with Tobit, and a Winding Stair, by Rembrandt).

[10] The painting was bought by Jacques de Roore, an agent bidding on behalf of Willem Lormier, art collector and dealer in The Hague, whose wax seal is still on the back of the panel.

[12] In his manuscript list of the 17 paintings that he sold to Voyer on that occasion, Lormier referred to it as Oud Mannetje en wenteltrap (Old Man with a winding stair).

Assuming that it was the Rembrandt, Anne Leclair notes that: "At an unknown date, Voyer acquired a second 'Philosopher" that he deemed close enough in style and format to make it a pendant".

[20] This was the beginning of a long series of graphic reproductions, both in France and Great Britain, that spread the fame of the two "Philosophers", while catering to the vogue for pendants.

[23] Wanting to curry favor with the influential duc de Choiseul, Voyer offered to part with his treasured Rembrandt so that the latter could enjoy possession of both "Philosophers".

The painting shows none of the conspicuous attributes of scholarship or philosophy—books, globe, scientific instruments, etc.—and the presence of at least one other figure involved in domestic tasks does not fit in with the solitude associated with study and meditation.

The French art historian Jean-Marie Clarke[26] argues that the scene is ultimately derived from the Book of Tobit, one of Rembrandt's favorite Old Testament sources.

[31] Although the title in the Louvre's publications remains Philosophe en méditation[32] catalogues of Rembrandt's painted oeuvre, starting with Bredius (1935) identify the subject more soberly as a "Scholar in an Interior with a Winding Stair.

"[34] The explanation for the long-standing misinterpretation of the Philosopher in Meditation lies in the fact that, in the second half of the 18th century, it was sold and collected together with a panel of identical size (28 x 33.5 cm) that presented similar motifs—in particular a spiral staircase—and was also attributed to Rembrandt.

The exception is the American art historian John C. Van Dyke, who whittled Rembrandt's oeuvre down to less than fifty paintings and made short shrift of the Louvre's Philosophers: "Small pictures over which, in the past, there has been much spilling of good printer's ink with no marked results.

[36] In 1955, examinations with X-rays and infrared photography at the laboratory of the Louvre revealed notable differences in treatment and caused the attribution to Rembrandt finally to be dropped.

[37] Jacques Foucart (1982), Curator for Dutch and Fleming Painting at the Louvre, like Horst Gerson (1968)[38] and Werner Sumowski (1983),[39] attributes this work to Salomon Koninck (1609–1656), a Rembrandt imitator, dating it to around 1645 and titling it Philosopher with an Open Book.

[41] The traditional iconography of the Doctors of the Church and St. Jerome provided the attributes for 17th-century representations of scholars in their study, which included books, a globe, and often a human skull.

[42] The identical format might well be a product of chance (standard supply) and it was long believed that the "pendant" had been enlarged by 2 cm at the top, but an examination of the panel by Clarke and Foucart in 1988 revealed that it was of one piece.

Any further speculation on the relationship between the two paintings must take into account manuscript notes from around 1750 written by their first French owner, the marquis de Voyer d'Argenson, who states that the two pictures were brought together "by chance.

[53] With his inversion of the title, Aldous Huxley (1954) sums up most of the "deeper" interpretations of the painting: "There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du Philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing more or less than the human mind, with its teeming darknesses, its moments of intellectual and visionary illuminations, its mysterious staircases winding downwards and upwards into the unknown.

"[55] Jean-Marie Clarke (1980) advanced a psychological interpretation based on the circular form of the composition and the Yin-Yang-like distribution of light, reading the painting as a Mandala in the Jungian sense: an archetypal symbol of the integrated Self.

1630 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Benesch 64) with the caption "HARMAN GERRITS van der Rhijn" written in Rembrandt's hand that shows his father in a pose similar to that of Tobit here, suggests that he may have been blind at the end of his life.

[59] Jean-Pierre Dautun (1983), a student of the French philosopher Raymond Abellio, offered a detailed phenomenological reading along Gnostic lines, interpreting the central motif of the painting (the basketwork tray) as "the navel, the omphalos of the luminous hermetic secret that Rembrandt wishes to transmit: the phenomenological secret that the eye of the genius will be given to those who will conquer the genius of the eye.

"[60] The German art historian Karl Clausberg also pointed out the "ocular nature" of the scene and gave it a conceptual framework in his 1999 book "Neuronale Kunstgeschichte.