Rediscovered Rembrandt portraits may be the artist's smallest paintings | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovered Rembrandt portraits may be the artist's smallest paintings

hyperallergic.com

27 pointsbookofjoe13 comments

My mom found an old portrait painting in an antique shop decades ago that looks similar to these. It's definitely a great painting, and it's signed Rembrandt, but of course there are hundreds of fakes out there for every real painting. Was he known for small paintings before these portraits were rediscovered?

The painting is in good quality -- would you expect significant deterioration of the paint if it was actually painted 400 years ago?

Curious if and when it's worthwhile to pay a professional to really have a good look it.

> Was he known for small paintings before these portraits were rediscovered?

Small is relative, but I've viewed (and occasionally copied and/or drawn) Rembrandts in maybe a dozen or so museums in the US and Europe and have never seen any close in size to the ones shown in the article -- those are much smaller than was typical for him. This Wikipedia page[1] should give you an idea of typical dimensions.

> would you expect significant deterioration of the paint if it was actually painted 400 years ago?

That depends very much on how they were cared for, and what support they are on (e.g. copper paintings tend to age very well; paintings on canvas somewhat less so); but certainly there are many paintings in pretty good shape that date from the seventeenth century.

(Not a professional appraiser, just a painter who occasionally sells his own work and a big Rembrandt fan, but I'd be curious to see a picture of your painting if you ever cared to share ...my email is on my website linked to my profile. Good luck!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Rembrandt

Interesting, makes sense. Here's a picture of it [0]: it's painted on what seems like a very thin piece of ivory or bone.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/0XWk96w

FWIW that doesn't look like Rembrandt's signature, which has a curl on the back of the R.

> The painting is in good quality -- would you expect significant deterioration of the paint if it was actually painted 400 years ago?

By Rembrandt's time they already knew many lightfast pigments which he would have mixed himself so if the painting was stored away correctly, it could theoretically be in decent shape.

To really authenticate one would cost tens of thousands of dollars, though, so it's almost certainly not worth it unless you already have a lot of money to burn. It takes a lot of professional labor to trace the painting's provenance even if the material tests check out because it could just be some practice painting by one of his students or a really old counterfeit.

Ironically, Rembrandt used[1] smalt, a glass powder with cobalt which is now known to be fugitive in some formulations; this includes Rembrandt works in the National Gallery in London[2].

[1] https://heritagesciencejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

[2] c.f. their excellent book, Art in the Making: Rembrandt

Surprisingly uninteresting. Not everything a master does is worth ones time.

After all they are formal portraits. Before photography, people used to commission these so their likeness would be preserved to future generations. "Interesting" isn't the primary quality people were looking for.

What makes this uninteresting but his other works interesting? To my untrained eye they all basically look the same.

Subject matter, as they are just portraits. As opposed to something like the Night Watchman.

https://archive.ph/mynA1

Still larger than a polaroid or a smartphone screen on which most people look at photos nowadays.

I was surprised they weren't self portraits. He so loved painting himself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com