It’s Raining Rembrandts

In 1935 Abraham Bredius published a catalogue of works by Rembrandt that included 624 paintings; in the second half of the twentieth century the Rembrandt Research Project – a team of art historians and specialists in related disciplines – drastically reduced that number, confirming the attribution of less than half of those paintings. Living organisms shed and regain weight, so it seems inevitable that such a narrowing of inventory should be followed by a spate of growth. In 2018, the leading world expert on the Dutch painter, the late Ernst van de Wetering, predicted that a new Rembrandt would appear roughly every twenty years. If anything, his estimate proved conservative. Between 2015 and 2023, three appeared on the market: Allegory of the Sense of Smell, Portrait of a Young Gentleman, and a small-format Adoration of the Magi which wassold at auction in 2021 for the paltry sum of 10,000 euros and attained a price of 10 million just two years later, in 2023, this time as a certified Rembrandt. Together, it seems, long-deceased artists, scholars, and merchants can perform miracles.