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Museum Bredius, which is in possession of the
sketch, said on Thursday that the discovery was first made by
Dutch art historian Jeroen Giltaij when he was conducting
research for his soon-to-be-published book on Rembrandt
paintings.
"The discovery was a pleasant surprise," Boris de Munnick from
Museum Bredius said. "We already had one artwork of Rembrandt,
and now we suddenly have two."
"From the start, I was certain that this sketch must be a
Rembrandt", Giltaij told Reuters. He said it is hard to
distinguish between works created by the famous painter and ones
made by his followers. "But this sketch is so splendidly
painted, it just had to be made by Rembrandt."
He added, however, that some might contest this claim. "That's
how it goes in the Rembrandt art world."
After performing a restoration on the sketch, Museum Bredius
agreed with Giltaij and contacted Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, home
to Rembrandt's masterpiece "Nightwatch." Its researchers
performed a technical analysis on the small oil sketch. They
concluded the same: it was painted by Rembrandt.
Though the sketch resembles Rembrandt's 1633 painting "The
Raising of the Cross," dendrochronological research conducted on
its panel found that the plank dates from 1634 and that it could
have been used between 1642 and 1645, meaning that the artwork
could not have been a preliminary sketch of the bigger painting.
"More research will be done to find out what the sketch's
purpose was," said Giltaij. "But that investigation will start
with the notion that the sketch is a Rembrandt."
(Reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout in Amsterdam; Editing by
Matthew Lewis)
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