Rembrandt’s Monogram
The auction house thought the portrait was a 17th century Rembrandt knockoff, and valued it at just $3,100. For the British buyer that paid 1,500 times more than that, he surely knew what situation he put himself in. According to the experts the Rembrandt Laughing was a self portrait done by the Dutch master depicted with his head tilted back in easygoing laughter and it was sold for a measly four and a half million in an English auction house.
Around $30 to $40 million is the price that the artwork should have gotten at the auction and there is one collector who is rather unimpressed by how cheap the price was during the auction. After being asked to change the value of the painting the art expert from Sotheby’s declined to do so. It is not every day that a work of Rembrandt comes on the market and so this sale in particular is a rare opportunity.
In his hometown of Leiden was where Rembrandt painted the self portrait and he was in his early 20s then in 1628. Already he was earning his reputation as an artist, and experimenting with a mirror and his own face to capture expressions. You could say that it has an unbelievable presence. In its most natural quality were the light and the laughter as well.
More than 100 years was how long the painting has been in the hands of an English family. Either it was one of Rembrandt’s students or it was his imitator. Poor photographs may have presented little of the painting’s luminosity or depth and these could have been the cause for the low evaluation from the auction house. Pointing to Rembrandt were the materials, contour, brush stroke, and monogram, all of these pointed to Rembrandt and a 23 page analysis was made to support how he was responsible for the little work.
Considering the rare style used by the artist for a year or so, the winner of the auction might have known that the painting was a genuine Rembrandt from the monogram RHL. The monogram was short for Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden. For the assessment of the auction house, they recorded the signature HL. With regard to these initials they become even more convincing since they are painted onto the background and the brush strokes used match the directionality used by Rembrandt.
Bewildering the experts was the shape of the body of the laughing Rembrandt. When it comes to the piece, there was a woolly blanket for clothing, the metal armor and glossy shirt appeared amorphous, it lay in lumpy folds, and there was little description of the anatomy underneath. What is evident in this piece is a contour which had a character of his own and he used this in his later works. When it comes to the contour there is a certain autonomy to it and this must be because Rembrandt was trying out this particular way of painting the body for the first time.
What possesses the same size and type as the other paintings by Rembrandt is the thin copper plate on which the piece is painted. In the same way as all other works by Rembrandt, xrays have been able to show that this painting also has a second painting underneath. It was before 1800 and the painting’s whereabouts remained unknown and during this time a Flemish engraver made a mistake and attributed the original to the Dutch painter Frans Hals when he made a reproductive print not realizing how the face in the picture was that of Rembrandt’s. No one knew where it stayed afterwards because of the silence that followed.
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