Our Three Paintings are not by Rembrandt, says the Mauritshuis
April 18 2025
Picture: Mauritshuis
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
We are very accustomed to exhibitions drawing attention to exciting new research regarding upgrades in attribution. However, The Mauritshuis in The Hague has just opened a display which examines three paintings that curators have concluded are not by Rembrandt. Here's a webpage which explains their reasoning behind the rejections. Of course, explaining why a painting is not by an artist takes a great deal of reasoning too. This is why, I have noted from experience, that valuers of works of art are often also highly skilled at being able to deliver bad news.
According to their website:
The Mauritshuis also has seven paintings that have once been purchased as Rembrandts, but which have now been written off or are strongly called into question. Three of the paintings in this last category were recently re-examined in our conservation studio with the most modern techniques available to us today. Two of those works have also been restored. What has this taught us? Rembrandt research is never done, and that includes the work we do at the Mauritshuis.
The display will be on view until mid-July 2025.
Update - Bendor here with a question. The Mauritshuis says of one of the paintings, the c.1650 Study of an Old Man, that their analysis has demonstrated the 'Rembrandt' signature is genuine. However, they also say:
You might think “Rembrandt signed it, so it must be ‘a real Rembrandt’.” But it’s not that simple. It was not unusual for a master to sign the work of a student. If it was painted at Rembrandt’s studio, it was his ‘product’. With Rembrandt’s signature, a painting by a student could be sold as if it were a piece by the master.
So my question is - how usual was this really? I think it was unusual, in the 17th century at least, for a master to sign a painting which was wholly the work of a student. We also have to ask, what is the evidence Rembrandt himself was in the habit of signing works by his pupils? As far as I know, this is a theory which developed as later generations of Rembrandt scholars, especially during the Rembrandt Research Project, tried to explain away paintings which were signed, but which they did not believe on the basis of connoisseurship were by Rembrandt. The theory was developed to fit the conclusions (even as the connoisseurship has now evolved, and many previously rejected paintings have now been accepted again). But I don't think we have any direct, contemporary evidence that Rembrandt did this, even though the assertion that he did has passed into general fact nowadays. I would be glad to hear other views!
PS - my other question is; if this exercise is all about studying Rembrandt's technique and inviting views on connoisseurship, could The Mauritshuis please allow us to see some proper high resolution photos? Thanks!
Update II - there is a good essay on the Leiden Collection website by Michiel Franken and Jaap van der Veen, “The Signing of Paintings by Rembrandt and His Contemporaries” (2022), which goes into the signing question in some detail. The essay demonstrates that we have very little contemporary evidence that artists signed works entirely by pupils, still less that it was common, and none at all that it was Rembrandt's practice.
Data on the sale of Rembrandt’s works is extremely scarce, but a note by Rembrandt himself provides some insight. He recorded the sale of certain studio works on the back of a drawing, which can be dated around 1636. Rembrandt documented the names “Fardynandus” and “Leendert,” as well as the subjects of three of the paintings that were sold, namely a “Flora,” a “Vaandeldrager” (standard-bearer), and an “Abraham.” [...]
The fact that Rembrandt included on the back of this drawing the names of his pupils who made these paintings could indicate that he sold them not under his own name but as works made by advanced pupils under his supervision. [...] The relatively low price paid for such studio work must mean the buyers knew that these pieces—signed or not—were absolutely not by the master himself.
None of this is to doubt that Rembrandt had, at times in his career (though NB, not always), a busy studio. Nor that many of his works, even signed ones, contain studio participation. This would indeed be normal artistic practice for a successful painter. The question is whether Rembrandt signed works entirely by pupils, or allowed works by pupils signed 'Rembrandt' to be sold as 'Rembrandts' from his workshop, which is a theory that has come to be commonly accepted in Rembrandt scholarship.
I have been interested in where this theory developed. As I mentioned above, it appears to have grown out of needing to explain how works which the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) did not think were by Rembrandt nonetheless bore 'genuine' and contemporary Rembrandt signatures. An early example was this 1633 Portrait of a Lady in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. It had a long tradition of being by Rembrandt, and was signed as such with a provably contemporaneous signature. But in 1986 it was doubted by the RRP, mainly on stylistic grounds. How to solve this puzzle? As Josua Bruyn wrote [Vol.2, p.105]:
Since the woman's portrait in Braunschweig is to be seen as the work of one of the assistants in who helped in Rembrandt's workshop with carrying out the portrait commissions that were flooding in the 1630s, one would have to assume that such an assistant appended the master's name to his own work in this and other instances, and did so in the form Rembrandt was using at that particular moment.
The reason I think the case of this portrait is so interesting in the Rembrandt signature story is that it is now once again accepted as a genuine Rembrandt, and was included by Ernst van der Wetering in his revised Vol.6 of the RRP. So the portrait's attribution to Rembrandt has been reaccepted, but the signature thesis behind its former rejection still stands.
It is also worth noting that in Volume 3 of the RRP, Josua Bruyn wrote that while:
[...] it is conceivable that Rembrandt signatures were appended in the workshop by his studio assistants - as a kind of trademark [...] It is remarkable that to date we have met nothing that argues for the theoretically perfectly plausible opposite situation - that of Rembrandt putting his own signature on the work of pupils.
So even the RRP themselves were uncertain about the signature thesis, which (as the Mauritshuis project demonstrates) has now nonetheless passed into commonly accepted wisdom.
