Christie’s to Auction Two Unseen Rembrandt Portraits After Nearly 200 Years
COURTESY CHRISTIE’S/©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LIMITED 2023
Christie's to Auction Two Unseen Rembrandt Portraits After Nearly 200 Years
- Christie’s to auction rare, unseen Rembrandt portraits after nearly 200 years in private collection.
- Two Rembrandt portraits, unknown to art scholars, discovered by Christie’s and set for auction.
- Unprecedented Rembrandt portraits found in family collection to be sold by Christie’s.
ondon, July 6 - Christie's, the renowned auction house, is set to sell two "exceptionally rare" Rembrandt portraits that have remained hidden from art scholars for nearly two centuries. The paintings, created by the esteemed 17th-century Dutch master, have never been publicly displayed and were recently discovered during a routine valuation conducted by experts from Christie's. The captivating subjects of these eight-inch portraits are Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and Jaapgen Carels, an elderly married couple from the Dutch city of Leiden, with the artworks dating back to 1635.
Henry Pettifer, Christie’s international deputy chair of Old Master paintings, expressed his astonishment, stating, “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,” in an interview with the Financial Times.
The estimated value of these remarkable pieces ranges from $6.26 million to $10 million (£5 million to £8 million). Before the auction, they will be exhibited in New York and Amsterdam, captivating art enthusiasts worldwide. This is the second time that Christie’s will handle the sale of these works, as the auction house sold the oil paintings to the undisclosed UK family’s ancestors in 1824.
Both Van der Pluym and Carels had family connections to Rembrandt, with their son Dominicus marrying the daughter of Rembrandt’s uncle, further enhancing the historical significance of these portraits.
Christie’s has assured the authenticity of the artworks, with sufficient provenance information and expert analysis suggesting they are genuine Rembrandts. The paintings were also sent to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for independent technical and historical research, which led to the same conclusion, according to the auction house.
While these portraits are not expected to set new auction records for Rembrandt, who achieved a record sale of $33.2 million in 2009 for his painting “Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo” (1658), and $25.8 million for “Saint James the Greater” (1661) in 2007, Rembrandt paintings and other works by Old Masters often fetch even higher prices in private sales. In 2016, Christie’s facilitated a joint acquisition of rare pendant portraits depicting the Dutch couple Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, with each portrait selling for €80 million ($96 million). The Dutch and French governments, on behalf of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris, respectively, made the noteworthy acquisition.
The upcoming auction of these unseen Rembrandt portraits is expected to generate significant interest and excitement among collectors and art enthusiasts, as these masterpieces resurface from obscurity after almost two centuries.
