Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, in a black velvet cloak and white lace collar and cuffs

A young man in black velvet and white lace was sold in London as the work of Rembrandt's circle. One Amsterdam dealer looked at the lace, looked at the date, and bet that it was Rembrandt himself.

The story behind the painting

The painting, made around 1635, came up at Christie's in London catalogued only as "circle of Rembrandt". The Amsterdam art dealer Jan Six saw the catalogue entry and showed it to the Rembrandt scholar Ernst van de Wetering before booking a ticket to London. The picture struck him as very Rembrandt-like. His main clue was the tentative date in the catalogue, 1633 to 1635. At that young age, Six reasoned, Rembrandt did not yet have a circle, so the painting might well be an original from his early years. Six bought it through an anonymous investor.

What to look for

The full catalogue title describes the sitter: a gentleman shown half-length, in a black velvet cloak with a white lace collar and cuffs. Wikidata also records a glove and a table in the picture, and the canvas measures about 94.5 by 73.5 cm. Look closely at the lace. It was the careful lacework that sent Six hurrying to the National Gallery in London to compare it with Rembrandt's Portrait of Philips Lucasz from the same years, which shows similar lace. That portrait's companion, Portrait of Petronella Buys, also has lace and the same kind of background as both other paintings.

Meaning and intent

The story is really about how attribution works. A label like "circle of Rembrandt" places a painting near a master but not in his hand. Six's argument turned that label against itself: if the date was right, the circle did not exist yet, and the painting belonged to Rembrandt's juvenilia, early works that scholars have only begun to explore in recent decades. The source notes that the painting has not yet been catalogued as by Rembrandt, so the attribution remains a claim rather than a settled fact. The black and white costume and the lace became the evidence in that claim.

Legacy

The find caused a Dutch controversy. The dealer Sander Bijl, son of the restorer Martin Bijl, had also spotted the catalogue entry and had proposed to Six that they buy the painting together. He ended up bidding against Six, and only learned who had won when his own father was hired to restore it. At the time Martin Bijl was also restoring another Rembrandt owned by Six for the 2019 Rembrandt year. The painting had come from a private owner descended from Sir Richard Neave, 1st Baronet, or his son Sir Thomas Neave, and it is now on view in Amsterdam.