Authenticity Confirmed for Disputed Rembrandt
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The Gloucestershire auction house Moore Allen & Innocent thought the portrait was a 17th-century Rembrandt knockoff, and valued it at just $3,100 before a sale last October. But the British buyer who won a speculative bidding war and paid about 1,500 times more than that apparently knew what he was doing.
Experts have confirmed “Rembrandt Laughing” — bought for a bargain price of $4.5 million at the October auction — is a self-portrait by the Dutch master himself, depicted with his head tilted back in easygoing laughter.
William Noortman of Noortman Master Paintings, specializing in Dutch and Flemish masters, said it’s worth between $30 million and $40 million, adding: “I’m very surprised it didn’t make more at auction.”
The 9½-inch-by-6½-inch painting will hang in the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam through June 29, on loan from the anonymous Briton who bought it at Moore Allen & Innocent and had it cleaned and examined by British experts.
An art expert from Sotheby’s, Jan Six, declined to put a new value on the painting. But he said the sale itself was a rare opportunity, as Rembrandt’s works come on the market only once every few years.
“A self-portrait by Rembrandt, that’s absolutely unique — not in my lifetime,” Mr. Six said.
Rembrandt made the self-portrait around 1628, when he was in his early 20s and still in his hometown, Leiden. Already he was earning his reputation as an artist, and experimenting with a mirror and his own face to capture expressions.