A Dubious 'Rembrandt' in South Africa
May 21 2021
Picture: theconversation.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Scholar Gerard de Kamper and Conservator Isabelle McGinn of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, have penned a short blog giving an account of their recent research into a painting owned by the University. Indeed, the painting was gifted to the institution in 1976 and bore a traditional attribution to Rembrandt. The picture's provenance too, which could be traced in publications by the likes of Hofstede de Groot, seemed to suggest that the painting was taken seriously in the past. However, all of this was dashed after zinc white and barium sulphate were found in the work, materials which were only started to being produced in the mid nineteenth-century.
Update - A reader has pointed out that they could have saved themselves a lot of bother if they had simply spotted the work was a much later copy of this picture in the Leiden Collection.
