Rembrandt portraits to be sold by Christie’s after being hidden for almost 200 years
A pair of rare portraits by Rembrandt are being listed for auction by Christie’s, 199 years on from when they were previously sold by the same auction house.
They are expected to be sold for £5million to £8million when they are available for bidding at auction on July 6th in London. Rembrandt completed the paintings in 1635, and they depict his friends, Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife, Jaapgen Carels. According to Christie’s, these are the last known portraits by the Dutch artist which remain in private ownership.
Henry Pettifer, Christie’s International Deputy Chairman of Old Master Paintings, discovered the pair of portraits were Rembrandt’s. He told the Financial Times: “I wasn’t aware of what I was going to be seeing. I dared to dream. But it was extraordinary to me that the pictures had never been studied before. They were completely absent from the Rembrandt literature.”
Meanwhile, in a statement, Pettifer said it was “one of the most exciting discoveries we have made in the Old Masters field in recent years”.
He continued: “Painted with a deep sense of humanity, these are amongst the smallest and most intimate portraits that we know by Rembrandt, adding something new to our understanding of him as a portraitist of undisputed genius.”
Before the paintings head to auction on July 6th, they will be exhibited in New York and Amsterdam throughout June before arriving in London for a pre-sale exhibition at the beginning of July.
