THE REMBRANDT ADVENTURES

                                                  THE REMBRANDT ADVENTURES

                                                                By Betsy Brayer

There is no greater master of psychological penetration than Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69). George Eastman purchased Young Man in an Armchair in 1911 after it had been examined by Wilhelm von Bode, premier Rembrandt scholar of his generation and director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin.  It was the first old master portrait to enter the Eastman collection. By 1927 Eastman wrote that he was no longer buying landscapes but was concentrating exclusively on portraits.

Young Man in an Armchair

Although Eastman was emotionally attached to this painting, he constantly fretted about its condition. “Why are the shadows so dark and murky?” he would ask his advisors. “What happened to the signature?  Have the hands been repainted?  Is it over restored?  Did I pay too much?” After Bode’s Rochester visit in 1911, Carmen Mess of Knoedler’s conveyed some answers and advice. According to Bode, the painting was signed and dated 1660. “He [Bode] suggests your having the Rembrandt placed on an easel & so exposing it to a strong light whenever you are away from home as he claims this keeps it from getting too dark & is a good thing for the paint.” No curator today would agree with that advice! Eastman had the painting “restored” and cleaned several times. William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and a Rembrandt scholar, borrowed the painting for Rembrandt exhibitions in 1924 and 1930 and sent Eastman an x-ray of the hands that was taken during the 1930 exhibition. The x-ray showed that the hands had indeed been repainted.

The theft of the Rembrandt from Eastman House in 1968 was the catalyst that brought the whole 17^th-century Dutch school to the Gallery permanently.  During Harris Prior’s years as Gallery director (1962-1975) 17 works were transferred. Minor works had been transferred in 1936 and 1950.  The Rembrandt caper was the work of amateurs. Two nights earlier (a practice run, apparently) the thieves successfully removed Eastman’s painting of Cabin Interior—Rainy Day by Arthur B. Davies.  On a January evening in 1968, a W. C. Fields film was playing in the Dryden Theatre and Nan Brown was working late for Beaumont Newhall on the third floor of the house.  The three thieves stayed after the movie—probably in the men’s room—then moved effortlessly into the house, took the painting, and exited via a window. They left the gilt frame dangling on a fence and tire tracks in snow that were identified as belonging to a small foreign car.  Harry Silver, a guard who is remembered by the insurance office as announcing, “I’m Hi-O Silver, but I left my horse outside,” spotted the open window on morning rounds.

The painting went missing for nine months. The three thieves hailed from Rochester, Buffalo, and Chicago, ages 38 to 50. A police informant in Montreal offered to buy the painting for $50,000 and negotiations ensued. On October 15, 1968, state police gathered at the Clinton County airport near Plattsburg to arrest the three who were about to load the Rembrandt, rolled and wrapped in tissue paper, aboard a small plane bound for Canada. Eventually charges were dropped: one man had turned informant and achieved immunity and the other two were wanted for “ serious” crimes in Buffalo.

As the bruised painting was rehabilitated, relined, re-varnished, remounted and repaired, the theft became the vehicle to bring it to the Gallery. By the terms of Eastman’s will, the painting belonged to the University of Rochester. After George Eastman House became an independent museum, the paintings remained there by courtesy and inertia. With a new, enlarged, temperature controlled and secure Gallery building opening in 1968, it became something of a cause for director Harris Prior to bring the whole 17^th-century Dutch and Flemish school (Hals, Rembrandt, van de Cappelle, van Dyck) to the Gallery permanently. He achieved it.

From the evidence of the Eastman correspondence, experts of that period never doubted that the painting was by Rembrandt, but its authenticity has been questioned since Eastman’s lifetime.  Between 1913 and 1990 Rembrandt’s official oeuvre shrank from 988 works to fewer than 300, thanks to the Rembrandt Research Project sponsored by the Dutch government. These experts claim that Rembrandt ran a large-scale commercial studio much as Rubens did, in which assistants worked on most of the portraits. Conceived in the 1960s, by 1989 the project had published three volumes (1584 pages) covering works up to the year 1642. Our painting dates from 1660. But commission members who saw our painting on exhibit during the Rembrandt tercentenary in 1969 and again here in 1970 wrote to a Gallery curator in 1989 that the painting’s “chances of convincing us eventually of its authenticity are practically nil.”

The authenticity debate is still not settled.  Dr. Christopher Brown, curator of 17^th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings at the National Gallery, London, rejects the “hypothesis of a flourishing studio turning out Rembrandtesque works.” He sees no documentary evidence for a studio of this type and endorses the traditional view that the artist simply worked very hard as the most sought-after portrait painter in Amsterdam. Brown cites “the fierce pace of his work” as the definitive factor in “variations in quality” in the portraits. No one ever said ours is the best Rembrandt ever seen—but there are undisputed works (such as portraits of his son Titus) that could be considered second-rate.

David Walsh, who teaches 17^th-century art at the University of Rochester, agrees with Brown. In a talk to the Memorial Art Gallery docents in 2001, Walsh, who unlike the Dutch commission, has lived with and taught from our Rembrandt for many years, said there is nothing about our painting that would cause him to doubt that it is by Rembrandt.  Also, an analysis by the Fogg Museum at Harvard showed that the materials used—canvas, pigments, etc.--are 17^th-century and typical of those favored by Rembrandt.

Betsy Brayer, the author of Magnum Opus: The Story of the Memorial Art Gallery, George Eastman, and many articles on Rochester’s architecture and art, is also a docent, graduating with the class of 1989.