First Published in ArtNews
Two “exceptionally rare” Rembrandt portraits that were unknown to art scholars have been unearthed in a family’s private collection.
The paintings by the 17th-century Dutch master, whose works frequently sell for millions at auction, have never been displayed publicly. They were discovered by experts from Christie’s during a routine valuation. The subjects of the eight-inch portraits are Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and Jaapgen Carels, an elderly married couple from the Dutch city of Leiden, and the paintings date back to 1635.
“I wasn’t aware of what I was going to be seeing,” Henry Pettifer, Christie’s international deputy chair of Old Master paintings, told the Financial Times. “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.”