What's in a Name?

What's in a Name?

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REMBRANDT OR NOT?

Only a handful of people in the world have the authority to determine whether a painting is a genuine Rembrandt. 

Titian Rembrandt van Rijn Antonello da Messina Hendrick Avercamp Adriaen Brouwer Francesco Francia Gaetano Gandolfi Giovanni di Paolo

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This past October, Moore Allen & Innocent, a small auction house in Cirencester, in the west of England, put on the block a 9½ -by-6½-inch oil-on-copper portrait of a jovial young man attributed to “a follower of Rembrandt.” After 18 minutes of tense one-upmanship among three bidders, then two, the painting, estimated at £1,000 to £1,500 ($2,000–3,000), finally sold for £2.2 million ($4.5 million), not including the buyer’s premium, to a representative of the London gallery Hazlitt Gooden & Fox.

The bidders were acting on a hunch that the work, The Young Rembrandt as Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher, was by the 17th-century Dutch master himself, despite inconclusive results from a recent study by the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. They were willing to take the gamble because they knew an autographed work by Rembrandt could make nearly 10 times what they paid. “I thought it looked very good,” says the seasoned Mayfair gallerist and former Sotheby’s Old Master specialist Derek Johns, who underbid the painting. “I thought it looked like a Rembrandt.”

Ernst van de Wetering, the head of Amsterdam’s Rembrandt Research Project, an institute founded in 1968 to determine the authenticity of works attributed to the artist (see “Rembrandt or Not?”, page 140), agrees, and his is the most authoritative word on the matter. He’s excited about the discovery of an early work. “You see new painterly adventures taking place in it,” he told the Dutch magazine HP/De Tijd in February. “This is the first painting where you find his now-dynamic rhythm.” At press time, the reattributed picture was reportedly being offered for about $20 million.

Just months before, at Gilding’s Fine Art Auctioneers, in Leicestershire, in the Midlands, a similar episode occurred. A local private seller had consigned a 36-by-26-inch painting of a bearded man in a black costume and white bib collar attributed to the 18th-century Continental school (est. £300–500; $600–1,000). It set off a bidding battle, eventually going for £205,000 ($413,000), not including the buyer’s premium, to a London gallery rumored to be Hazlitt. Experts are now saying the picture could be a Titian from 1510–20. If it is, the resale value would again be at least 10 times the purchase price. But the odds are good that it’s not: A postsale cleaning revealed no further evidence of the artist’s hand.

Old Master attributions have long straddled the line between science, albeit an inexact one, and business. Of late, there has been a proliferation of cases like those outlined above—and not just at small houses. Is this due to new scholarship and technology? Increased demand for name-brand works? Or is it just a continuation of a centuries-old guessing game? Whatever the answer, buying Old Masters can sometimes feel like playing the roulette wheel.

George Goldner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairman of drawings and prints, calls betting on attributions part of the job. “I try to describe it to new collectors as being a bit like justice,” he says. “You go before a court, and with any luck, the judge tries to do the best he can to arrive at the right answer. And sometimes he or she gets it beyond reasonable doubt. But it’s not mathematics in most cases—there is always some potential element of doubt or questions that come in, and you have to live with that. Even the greatest connoisseurs I’ve known in my career have made mistakes.”

In market terms, authorship errors can translate into thousands, even millions, of dollars made—and lost. At Sotheby’s New York in January 1999, the North Carolina Museum of Art offered Madonna with the Christ Child by Francesco Francia, called Il Francia (circa 1450–1517), which had been catalogued in several publications and acquired from New York’s David M. Koester Gallery in 1952. The work fetched $134,500, doubling the $60,000 high estimate. But when it returned to the auction block last December, at Christie’s London, the attribution was downgraded to “studio of” Il Francia and the estimate lowered to £30,000 to £50,000 ($62,000–103,000). “In the interim,” says the London dealer and former Christie’s Old Master specialist Charles Beddington, “a book had been written saying it wasn’t by him. That’s a fairly rare example of something like that coming back and taking a hit for its owner.” The painting brought just £48,500 ($98,000).