Clean-up reveals Rembrandt windfall

By LOUISE JURY in London

A private art collector's belief that a three-centuries-old painting was a Rembrandt has been vindicated and the work by the Dutch master is now expected to sell for £5 million ($14.3 million).

The Rembrandt self-portrait was lost when one of the artist's students painted over it, but an unnamed French collector contradicted expert views when he bought it in the 1960s, believing it to be by the Dutch painter.

The purchaser's son, who has not been named, now stands to make a fortune from the picture - one of only three Rembrandt self-portraits known to be in private hands.

The true history of the work was revealed in the past three years when the picture was examined with x-rays and infra-red photography.

Painstaking cleaning revealed the image of the artist who was already famous when it was painted in 1634, when he was 28. It will be the first Rembrandt self-portrait to appear at auction for 30 years when it is sold at Sotheby's on July 10.

George Gordon, one of the auctioneer's Old Master specialists, said: "It's very special indeed. To have an unknown Rembrandt self-portrait is fairly extraordinary."

The discovery is an important breakthrough for scholars because it helps unravel a feature of Rembrandt's art that has been a mystery for years - why he painted so many self-portraits, about 80 in all.

Historians, led by Professor Ernst van de Wetering of the Rembrandt Research Project, believe this discovery shows they were produced not as personal, introspective studies, but as commercial products.

Visitors to Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam could buy one of the portraits as a memento - but when this one was unsold within five years of being painted, a student was allowed to re-work it into a portrait of fashionable Russian aristocrat with a tall hat and long curls. Gordon said the value would have been between £50,000 to £200,000 when the work was credited to the studio of Rembrandt or as partially by Rembrandt's hand.

The painting is currently on display in an exhibition at the Museum Het Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam and will get its first public showing in Britain at Sotheby's in London before the auction.

- INDEPENDENT