Rembrandt House to Show "New" Self-Portrait

AMSTERDAM—The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam announced today that it will exhibit the “new” Rembrandt self-portrait that was discovered last year at Moore, Allen & Innocent auction house in the U.K. The special exhibition, set to run from June 7 to 29, will feature the painting, The Young Rembrandt as Democritus the Laughing Philosopher, along with a handful of related works and the extensive documentation that led to the positive attribution.

The painting, in which the young artist is seen laughing, had been passed down through at least three or four generations of a single British family, which thought it was the handiwork of a 19th-century “follower of Rembrandt.” In October, Moore & Allen, a sleepy little auction house in Cirencester, England, put the 9.5-by-6.5-inch oil-on-copper portrait up for sale with an estimate of £1,000 to £1,500.

The final selling price was considerably more. Several bidders, believing the work was an undiscovered Rembrandt, pushed the price to an astounding £2.2 million ($4.5 million). The anonymous buyer was thought to be a London art dealer.

“The interest it generated, the people who were here, and the price it achieved would say that it’s a Rembrandt,” said Christopher Surfleet, an auctioneer with Moore, Allen & Innocent, at the time.

In early 2008, the world’s leading Rembrandt scholar, Ernst van de Wetering, head of Rembrandt Research Project in Amsterdam, declared the work genuine, following an exhaustive examination of the painting. The RRP found that unique characteristics of the signature, the size of the copper plate, and certain stylistic choices in the painting technique indicated that Rembrandt painted it around 1628, when he was 22 years old.

In addition, the work had already been documented in a reproductive print dating from around 1800. Although the printmaker had attributed the original to Frans Hals, in the early 20th century historians began to believe the original was actually a Rembrandt. “All these factors contributed to a growing sense of excitement that we had found a new Rembrandt,” said Van de Wetering in late November.

The work’s owner, who still has not identified himself, seems to have paid market price for the painting. In January 2006, Sotheby’s New York sold Study of an Elderly Woman in a White Cap (1640) for $4.27 million. In January 2007, the house sold two larger oil paintings: Portrait of a Young Woman with a Black Cap (1632), for $9 million, and Saint James the Greater (1661), for $25.8 million.