subject: Rembrandt And Laughing [print this page] Because the auction house did not see the portrait to be anything but a knockoff of a 17th century Rembrandt, the price was set at only $3,100. But the British buyer who paid about 1,500 times more than that apparently knew what he was doing. It has been confirmed by experts that the Dutch master, depicted with his head tilted back in easygoing laughter, was indeed the maker of Rembrandt Laughing which was bought from an English auction house for a bargain price amounting to four and a half million.
For a collector whose specialty is in Dutch and Flemish masters this kind of work is usually valued at around $30 to $40 million and he is not impressed with the price it got at the auction. With regard to putting a new value on the painting the art expert from Sotheby's did not agree to it. It is not every day that a work of Rembrandt comes on the market and so this sale in particular is a rare opportunity.
In his hometown of Leiden was where Rembrandt painted the self portrait and he was in his early 20s then in 1628. This was when he was starting to earn his reputation as an artist and he began experimenting with expressions by using a mirror and his face. You could say that it has an unbelievable presence. The light has the most natural quality of light you can think of and I love the naturalness of the laughing.
There was an English family who previously owned the painting for 100 years. For some, either it was an imitator of Rembrandt or one of his students. When it comes to the low evaluation given by the auction house, to blame are poor photographs that may have shown little of the painting's luminosity or depth. But in a 23 page analysis, he described why Rembrandt was almost certainly the creator of the little work, brush stroke, contour, materials and the monogram all point to the master's hand.
A rare style was used by the artist lasting only a year or so and the winner of the auction might have recognized that the painting was a genuine Rembrandt from the monogram RHL. For the monogram, it meant Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden. For its assessment the auction house recorded the signature HL. There are other monograms identified with Rembrandt that possess the same direction in brush strokes as this one making it even more compelling and the initials are also painted onto the background.
The shape of the body of the laughing Rembrandt ended up baffling the experts. Besides having little definition of the anatomy below, a way to describe it was that it had a wooly blanket for clothing, the metal armor and glossy shirt appeared amorphous, and it lay in lumpy folds. Here he applied a contour which had a character of its own and used it in his later works. Rembrandt was probably trying out this method of painting the body for the first time for the contour has a certain autonomy to it.
Considering the size and type of the thin copper plate on which the piece is painted, it matches the other Rembrandt paintings. A common characteristic among all Rembrandt paintings is a second painting underneath each one and xrays that this had the same dual image. The painting had no recorded location before 1800 and at the time a Flemish engraver made a reproductive print and attributed the original to the Dutch painter Frans Hals as he did not see that the image bore the face of Rembrandt. What followed was silence and then the painting was again lost.
