Here is an article I wrote in “The Save Rembrandt Campaigner” before the exhibition “Rembrandt and his Workshop” opened at the National Gallery in 1991. From the newspaper reproduction you will not be able to see quite how bad Joudeville was as a painter; so I put a colour reproduction below it.
Article from the Save Rembrandt Campaigner
Jouderville's painting
It is not just the fact that the head does not fit on the shoulders, all the geometry of the head is askew. It has a superficial likeness to Rembrandt because Joudeville was his student for a short time in Leiden. When Rembrandt left for Amsterdam Joudeville understood he did not have the makings of a painter and enrolled in the university.
How a man who has spent five years at art school could make such a gross error of judgment beats me. How that same man could go on regaling us with his connoisseurship in his subsequent publications and at the Benboom party, is a positive miracle of self-delusion. After my article Dr. Christopher Brown, then of the National Gallery, obviously agreed with me and Van der Wetering’s great discovery of Joudeville (revealed in volume III of the RRP) was quietly dropped.
Apart from aesthetic considerations, the sheer foolishness of suggesting that the young Rembrandt who went to Amsterdam to make his name would have had the temerity to send in a student to do a commissioned portrait for him should have alerted his colleagues that all was not well.