two portraits of Rembrandt, which had never been exhibited before and were even unknown to Old Masters researchers, They were found in the collection of a family in the United Kingdom when specialists from Christie’s auction house They performed a routine assessment.
“I wasn’t aware of what I was going to see,” said Henry Pettifer, the auction house’s international vice president for old master paintings when he found the Rembrandt portraits in a private collection of a family in the Netherlands, after being summoned to a routine assessment.
The specialist described as “extraordinary” that these pieces were absent in the work studies of the 17th-century Dutch master, according to what was quoted by the Financial Times newspaper.
The portraits, which date to 1635, will go on sale at Christie’s in London on July 6, after showings in New York and Amsterdam, with an estimated value for the two pieces between $6 million and $10 million.
Generations ago, the family, whose identity was not disclosed by Christie’s, bought the pair of small-scale oil paintings in 1824 at auction from the same house.
After analyzing the portraits and conducting research that showed a “virtually unbroken” line of provenance back to the sitters who commissioned Rembrandt, Christie’s deemed the paintings to be the genuine article.
The auctioneer sent the images for analysis to experts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a global Rembrandt scholarship center, who agreed with the diagnosis and awarded the paintings to the Dutch painter.
The portraits represent Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife Jaapgen Carels, a couple with family connections to the artist.
Van der Pluym, who made his fortune from plumbing, was a prominent figure in Leiden. His son Dominicus married the daughter of Rembrandt’s uncle. And the year the portraits were painted, they bought a garden next to Rembrandt’s mother’s.
Rembrandt’s auction record was set in 2009, when the portrait “Man with Arms on Hips” sold for £20.2 million at Christie’s, as part of an Old Masters auction market. , which is in decline in relation to contemporaries, since in the last year for the house the paintings of old masters represented only 7%.
“The challenge is to offer really great paints that, by virtue of our category, are very rare right now… The market is selective but it’s very strong for the right material,” Pettifer said.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
