February 27, 2019
Hellen van Meene for The New York Times
The discovery that upended Jan Six’s life occurred one day in November 2016. Six is a 40-year-old Dutch art dealer based in Amsterdam, who attracted worldwide attention last year with the news that he had unearthed a previously unknown painting by Rembrandt, the most revered of Dutch masters — the first unknown Rembrandt to come to light in 42 years. The find didn’t come about from scouring remote churches or picking through the attics of European country houses, but rather, as Six described it to me last May, while he was going through his mail. He had just taken his two small children to school (in true Dutch fashion, by bicycle: one seated between the handlebars and the other in back). The typical weather for the season, raw wind and spitting rain, would never deter a real Amsterdammer from mounting his bike — and Six’s roots in the city go about as deep as possible — but by the time he arrived at his office, he was feeling the effects. Waterkoud (“water cold”) is the Dutch word for the chilly dampness of the Low Countries that seeps into the bones.
The antidote to that feeling is encompassed in another word. Gezelligheid, loosely translated as coziness, is the condition people in the Netherlands strive for in the interiors of their homes. It’s often what’s being depicted and celebrated in old-master canvases from the Golden Age of the 17th century, the era that is Six’s specialty: warm domestic scenes, merry companies hoisting tankards, still lives of tables laden with food. Six’s office, on the ground floor of a building on the Herengracht, one of the city’s main canals — a canal that Rembrandt himself used to stroll — has its share of gezelligheid. The building dates from the early 1600s. Ancient beams cross the ceiling. The views out of the windows are of bicyclists racing by and the evocative, ever-somber surface of the canal reflecting the gabled facades of the buildings on the opposite side.
Six made coffee that morning, then sat down to a stack of mail. He dispensed with the bills and other annoyances first so as to settle into the catalogs of coming art auctions. One was for a December event at Christie’s in London. He skimmed it quickly, almost dismissively; it was for the daytime sale, which featured lesser objects. The top paintings and sculptures are always reserved for the evening.
And then, he told me, he stopped cold. The slightly miscolored photograph in the catalog was a portrait of a rather dazed-looking young gentleman with a lace collar and a proto-Led Zeppelin coif. What first spoke to Six was the gaze of the subject (whose identity remains unknown): “He pierces the image,” he said. Six felt that he had seen the work before, but after tearing through his library in search of it, he came to believe it wasn’t the actual image that struck him as familiar but the sum of all the telltale features of an early Rembrandt. These include, in Six’s estimation, the humanness of that gaze, a “rounded” brush stroke and a willingness to employ different painting styles within the same work.
The painting dated from somewhere between 1633 and 1635. The giveaway was the particular type of lace collar, which was the height of fashion in that brief span and then quickly went out of style. What especially excited Six was not just that Christie’s had failed to see that the painting was most likely from the hand of the master, but also that the auction house had labeled it “circle of Rembrandt” — i.e., from a follower. “You see the problem, right?” he asked me. I was puzzling for the solution to the riddle when he blurted it out: “Rembrandt wasn’t famous yet in the early 1630s, so there was no circle. I knew right away Christie’s had screwed up.”
From there, Six was a bloodhound on the trail. He learned that the painting’s provenance went back to Sir Richard Neave, an English merchant of the late 1700s who built a serious art collection, which included works by Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable; the painting had stayed in the same family for six generations. This fit: It made sense that a painting by a top-tier artist would have attracted a prominent collector.
Six was so excited that he jumped on his bike and cycled a short distance across central Amsterdam to the home of Ernst van de Wetering, universally renowned as a top authority on Rembrandt; still breathless, Six thrust a photocopy of the picture at him. As befits a person whose opinion is weighted with import, van de Wetering typically reacts with reserve on first seeing an image, but he was intrigued. “It looked like a Rembrandt, but it was completely new to me,” van de Wetering told me later. Six cycled back home and bought a plane ticket.
There were a few people in the Christie’s London showroom when he arrived, Six told me, so he looked at other paintings until they left, then made his way to the portrait, studied it and took pictures of it. “I was shocked, because it had a different appearance in person,” he said. “It had far more depth.”
Six was particularly drawn to the lace on the collar. Lace was a signifier of status throughout the 17th century, and Six believes Rembrandt had a signature way of depicting this variety, which is called bobbin lace. Other artists of the period painstakingly executed its intricacies in white paint on top of the jacket. Rembrandt did something like the opposite. He first painted the jacket, then over it the collar area in white, then used black paint to create the negative spaces in the collar. And where other painters were careful to create repeating patterns in the lacework, Rembrandt wove a freestyle design.
For viewers standing a few inches away from such a painting, the collar appears as a hieroglyphic jumble; step back a pace, and it coheres. Six believes this was one aspect of Rembrandt’s genius. “He realized that a painted copy of a repetitive pattern, even if it followed the original, actually looked artificial.”...MUCH MORE
After he left the Christie’s showroom, Six went around the corner to an art-book shop, where he found “A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings,” the authoritative guide to the entire oeuvre....
HT: MetaFilter who provide some related links
