Consider the case of Jan Lievens and Rembrandt van Rijn, two young Dutch painters and rivals in Leiden at the start of their careers, circa 1630. One produced work that astonished his colleagues and promised greatness, while the other was considered an able follower who had some catching up to do. It‘s a small miracle that Rembrandt wasn’t completely overshadowed by his brilliant friend.

Of course, posterity has a rather different opinion, and for centuries, Rembrandt has been the one rightly considered among the geniuses of painting, while Lievens (1607–1674) has generally been placed with the good artists in the loosely defined Rembrandt school. But the dramatic Lievens revival of the past few years will be capped in October when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., debuts its retrospective of the artist’s work, featuring 45 paintings.

In terms of Lievens’s market, however, there’s a caveat: It’s only his early works, made up until about 1632, that are being hotly pursued. (Luckily these come up fairly often at auction.) For the Dutch master is one of those artists whose brilliant promise was never quite fulfilled, and although, unlike Rembrandt, he was extremely successful all his life—with a swelled ego to match—his mature and late paintings became increasingly facile.

A child prodigy who reportedly began painting lifelike portraits at age 12 and who had his own studio by his midteens, Lievens made his mark with large compositions of fleshy figures brashly executed in a manner designed to attract attention. And attention is what they’re getting. The artist’s recently discovered Card Players, 1622–24, which turned up at Sotheby’s Amsterdam last May, is typical of his early in-your-face works. The candlelit Caravaggesque scene is painted in what Sotheby’s George Gordon describes as an “almost shockingly rough manner, with meaty thick brushstrokes that give heft to the figures.” Estimated at €150,000 to €200,000 ($204–272,000), it sold to a New York private collector for a hammer price of €1,768,000 ($2.4 million). But that didn’t get close to the artist’s record, which was set in 2004 at Sotheby’s London by the beautiful Study of the Head and Shoulders of an Old Man Wearing a Cap, 1629. Estimated at £200,000 to £300,000 ($400–600,000), this fine picture skyrocketed to a record £1,853,600 ($3.4 million).

“One looks at prices for Lievens of only a few years ago and gets a bit wistful,” says Gordon. Case in point: Portrait of a Young Boy in Persian Dress, 1631, sold at Bonhams in December 1990 for a then-record £530,000 ($1 million). When it showed up on the block again, at Christie’s New York in June 2004, it went to a New York collector for $2,079,500 (est. $1–1.5 million).

Jan Lievens has arrived. Watch your back, Rembrandt!

"Re-Mastered" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.