A Small Pennsylvania Museum Just Discovered It Has Owned a Rembrandt for 70 Years Without Knowing It

For five decades, a museum in
eastern Pennsylvania believed it owned a painting that was made in
the studio of Rembrandt van Rijn. After sending it out for routine
maintenance, they learned that the 388-year-old work was in fact
made by the Dutch Golden Age artist himself. 

Like many Old Master canvases,
layers of overpaint and varnish obscured Rembrandt’s oil-on-oak
painting Portrait of a
Young Lady (1632),
which has lived in the collection of the Allentown Art Museum since
1961. But new state-of-the-art conservation and imaging techniques
have allowed researchers to remove these layers, uncovering the
artist’s sure hand below. 

“We can see it with new eyes
now,” Elaine Mehalakes, the museum’s vice president of curatorial
affairs, tells Artnet News. “There’s a glow that was obscured
before. And it has a weight that’s been brought to it in terms of
the scholarly attention that it’s getting.” 

Portrait of a Young
Lady was donated to the
museum by the Kress Foundation, an organization formed around the
world-class collection of Renaissance artworks amassed by the
Allentown-born department store magnate Samuel Kress. At the time,
it was attributed to Rembrandt. But a decade later, a
Netherlands-based initiative dedicated to the study of the
Dutch painter declared it to have been merely made in
the artist’s Amsterdam workshop, not by the artist
himself.

This wasn’t an uncommon
occurrence with the artist’s work, says Mehalakes, noting
that “Rembrandt attributions
have been very volatile over the years.” There have been, at various times, as many as
600 paintings attributed to the artist, or as few as 200, the
curator says.

Formed in 1929, the Kress
Foundation has donated Renaissance masterpieces to regional museums
throughout the US. It oversees the conservation of these
artworks—free of charge to the institutions that now own
them—through a dedicated lab at New York
University. 

Beginning in 2018, researchers
performed a variety of newfangled tests on the Allentown Museum’s
painting, many of which had never been applied to it before,
including infrared reflectography, scanning electron microscopy,
and cross-section evaluation. They were able to peer into the “past
of the painting,” as Mehalakes puts it, and identify Rembrandt’s
brushstrokes.

For Mehalakes, the discovery was a reminder that the history
of art is not a closed book. “This single object in our collection has this
incredibly rich and complicated history and for all we know there
could be stories like that among other artworks,” she says. “It’s
very exciting.”

The newly restored painting will go on view at the Allentown
Art Museum beginning June 7, 2020.

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Owned a Rembrandt for 70 Years Without Knowing It appeared
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