New Getty Exhibition - Spotting Rembrandt

Given all of the news on Rembrandt with the recent auction sale and record price, I found this Wall Street Journal article by Candace Jackson both interesting and timely.  Jackson reports the Getty has a new exhibit opening on January 9th, 2010 on how to spot a Rembrandt. The new exhibit features dozens of real and fake Rembrandts, and reveals information on how to examine and what to look for in determining the real article or a fake. The article is interesting, but I would think the exhibit at the Getty will be of real interest to many collectors and appraisers.

Jackson states

The "fake" Rembrandts in the Getty's show are all drawings attributed to the Dutch master painter for hundreds of years, until as recently as a few years ago. Over the past 30 years, new scholarship and cataloguing techniques have helped scholars determine that at least half of the more than 1,000 "Rembrandt" drawings were by others.

One reason for all the confusion: Rembrandt had one of the largest teaching practices in his day, with at least 50 pupils studying closely alongside him in his sprawling Amsterdam studio. The curriculum included close imitations of his style and subject matter, says Lee Hendrix, the Getty curator for the show.

In the 17th century, some students eventually became more famous than Rembrandt, though of course that's not true today. (In the latter years of his life, Rembrandt's naturalistic style fell out of favor with wealthy patrons, who came to prefer a more flattering, less realistic painting, says Ms. Hendrix.) The Getty show features early training drawings by several of his best-known pupils, including Ferdinand Bol.

Another problem for scholars has been that although Rembrandt drew prolifically, very few of his drawings are signed. Scholars have used the signed drawings, and drawings connected to signed paintings, to find themes and symbols common to the unsigned work. These characteristics—like his use of storytelling, expressive faces and directional light— form the basis for determining modern historians which unsigned works are actually Rembrandts.

 Click HERE to read the full WSJ article.