The latest museum to add to this year's spate of surprise Old Master rediscoveries is Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, which now says that a painting attributed to a pupil of Rembrandt's that has long hung in a reception room is actually by the 17th-century Dutch great himself. The lowly authorship of the work, "Tobias and His Wife," was called into question by a prominent Rembrandt scholar who was thunderstruck by the painting as he strolled through the museum, declaring the scene "undoubtedly" by the hand of the virtuoso artist.

"One day we had a visit from Ernst van de Wetering, the driving force and brains behind the Rembrandt Research Project," Boijmans van Beuningen Museum director Sjarel Ex told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. "Van de Wetering said he’d like to get a better look at the thing, with some people and some microscopes. At a certain point it became evident that in his mind he was attributing this painting, this Barent Fabricius, to Rembrandt."

According to Van de Wetering, the 16-by-21-inch work, which depicts a man and woman seated before the hearth, bears marked similarities to Rembrandt's 1659 etching "Saint Peter and Saint John Healing the Cripple at the Gate of the Temple." He also has remarked that the quality of the painting’s details, the method of its perspective, and the depiction and placement of its figures resemble those found in other 1640s works by the artist.

The work, which was painted over an older still life by yet another artist, will be on display for one month at the museum. It is part of the collection of the Willem van der Vorm Foundation and has been on long-term loan since 1972. "It was an exceptionally good Fabricius, now it’s an unusual Rembrandt," Ex said, adding: "We’ve increased the insurance value from 80,000 to 8 million euros."

The reattribution follows this summer's news that the Yale University Art Gallery had an unattributed Velázquezin its basement, and just last month the Prado in Spain announced that it uncovered a previously unknown painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.