A rediscovered Rembrandt could sell for 18 million: two years ago it was valued at 10 thousand euros

Two years ago it went to auction for ten thousand euros, now it could be sold for as much as 17 million. We are talking about theAdoration of the Magi that has recently been attributed to Rembrandt: at Christie’s auction on October 6, 2021, the work, passed off as a “Rembrandt circle,” left with an estimate of 10-15 thousand euros, but potential buyers realized that it could perhaps be an autograph work by the Dutch seventeenth-century master and thus fought to buy it: in the end, the batter’s hammer awarded the work to the sum of as much as 860 thousand euros.

Christie’s clients had seen this coming: after being studied for a long time by Rembrandt experts, Sotheby’s, where the painting, measuring 24.5 by 18.5 centimeters, will be sold again on December 6, concluded that it is a work by Rembrandt that has been neglected for more than seven decades. It actually appeared on the market in the early 1950s, after which it was purchased by Dutch art collector Johannes Carel Hendrik Heldring in Amsterdam in 1955. After his death in 1962, his widow in 1985 sold the work to a German family, which retained possession of it until the decision to sell it at Christie’s two years ago.

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After the new studies, which also included technical analysis (X-rays, reflectographs), the painting’s estimate rose to 10-15 million pounds (11.5-17.4 million euros). According to Sotheby’s, theAdoration of the Magi is in fact a rare early work by Rembrandt, and would have been painted when the artist was just twenty-two years old and living in Leiden. According to scholars, theAdoration could be the work mentioned in the 1714 inventory of the Dutch collector Constantijn Ranst, then would be sold in 1814 and then again in 1822, until reappearing in the 1950s. At the time, some scholars recognized it as a work by Rembrandt, so much so that it was even exhibited as an autograph work: then, art historian Kurt Bauch, analyzing the work only from a black-and-white photograph, deemed it a product of the artist’s school and expunged the painting from Rembrandt’s catalog raisonné. This was, according to Sotheby’s, the beginning of the painting’s misfortune.

“I would say it’s particularly significant,” George Gordon, co-chair of the Old Master Paintings Worldwide section at Sotheby’s, told CNN, “because it enhances our understanding of Rembrandt at this crucial date in his development and career, when he was clearly very ambitious and developing very rapidly as an artist.” Moreover, according to Gordon, “Very few of Rembrandt’s narrative paintings remain in private hands, making this a rare and exciting opportunity for both a private collector and an institution. This sophisticated painting is in equal measure a product of Rembrandt’s brush and his intellect. All the hallmarks of his style in the late 1720s are evident in both the visible painted surface and the underlying layers revealed by science, which show multiple changes over the course of his creation and shed new light on his thinking.”

A rediscovered Rembrandt could sell for 18 million: two years ago it was valued at 10 thousand euros

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