Is It or Isn’t It? Possible Rembrandt Sells for $1.4 Million to Optimistic Bidder

Kaja Veilleux at the podium, having just sold Lot 2363, ‘After Rembrandt,’ for $1.4 million.
Image courtesy of Thomaston Place.

Rembrandt Van Rijn is one of the greatest artists in history. He earned his fame during the Dutch Golden Age with paintings like The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632) and The Night Watch (1642). He was a prolific painter of individual portraits. Even a portrait in his style can command over a million dollars, as Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in Thomaston, Maine, saw in this year’s Summer Grandeur Auction.

One of the many fine artworks on offer on day 2 was a portrait of a teenage girl wearing the dark dress, white cap, and ruffled collar characteristic of 17th-century Dutch dress, painted in oil on a cradled oak panel and housed in a Dutch giltwood frame. It was unsigned, but according to a label on the back of the frame from when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970, it was attributed to Rembrandt. Estimated at merely $10,000 to $15,000, its final price, including buyer’s premium, reached $1,175,000.

According to a statement,  Thomaston Place founder Kaja Veilleux discovered the painting “during a routine house call” in Camden, Maine. The painting, found among other works of art in the attic of a private estate, was “in remarkable condition,” and its provenance was clear.

“After Rembrandt.” Image courtesy of Thomaston Place

LiveAuctioneers’ Auction Central News reported that when the painting was loaned to the museum, the lender was Cary Bok of Camden, Maine, grandson of publisher Cyrus H.K. Curtis. The Curtis Publishing Company’s magazines included the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Bidding for the painting was intense, with nine staff members handling phone bids and two live bidders in-house. By the time the price reached $900,000, all but three phone bidders had dropped out. Ultimately, the winning bid was made by a private collector in the U.K.

Zebulon Casperson, the staff member at Thomaston Place who secured the final bid, called the experience “amazing,” saying, “It feels like a shared victory.”

It’s also a victory for Thomaston Place. Already a premier auction house in the region, with Veilleux considered a top appraiser; the sale bolsters its status as a rising star in the fine arts market.

If future analysis authenticates the painting as a Rembrandt—something that has happened to paintings initially attributed to his assistants— it wouldn’t be the first time a Rembrandt painting has been lost, then found and sold at auction. In 2015, a New Jersey auction offered a painting estimated at $500 to $800—which sold for $1,087,500 after online bidders in Europe recognized it as a Rembrandt.

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“Portrait of a Woman” went from being considered a masterpiece by Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669), to being declared as a “knock-off” painted by an unknown assistant, to now being worth potentially 10s of millions of dollars. A cleaning and new examination with modern methods led to experts re-evaluating its origin BACK to the paintbrush of Rembrandt himself.

In the 1970s, the Rembrandt Research Project, a Dutch organization that investigates attribution claims, decided the portrait that had been donated in 1961 to the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania as likely the work an assistant or student of Rembrandt. Earlier X-ray analyses had some historians questioning the authenticity of the brushwork. The apparent lack of clarity in the subject’s clothing also fueled doubts, as did concerns about the artist’s signature, which is painted differently from those on many of his other works.

Two years ago, the painting was sent to New York University for conservation and cleaning. Removing decades of grime and layers of varnish from previous “restorations” cleared away the doubts about the brush strokes and subtle hues. And it turns out the signature used on this portrait is consistent with other works from that year, 1632, when the painter, whose full name was Rembrandt van Rijn, briefly wrote his name as “RHLvan Rijn.”

“Portrait of a Young Woman” is expected to go back on display in Allentown on June 7. The museum is planning an accompanying exhibition that will explore the processes of conservation and attribution.

 

Photo: Shan Kuang / Allentown Art Museum