A New Rembrandt Was Just Discovered. So What?

As a result, there are artworks that are famously, indisputably by Rembrandt, and then there “are a number of borderline Rembrandts, which some people accept and others don’t,” Dickinson says. “But if it’s a great picture, it’s unlikely to have its attribution overturned.”

And that leaves the not-necessarily-great paintings, of which there are many, dispersed across the globe.

“There’s the old joke, Rembrandt painted 300 pictures, of which 600 are in America,” says the dealer Johnny van Haeften. “And certainly in the days before great scholarship, if it was a portrait of an old man in brown it was a Rembrandt, and if it was a landscape with a blue sky it was a Breughel.”

Now though, he says “we can narrow it down to a much more precise authorship.”

When Attributions Change
“Discoveries are what make this field interesting” Beddington says. “I think there are many more discoveries than one ever hears about.”

By discoveries, Beddington is referring to paintings that, for whatever reason, have been mis-attributed, and are thus valued at virtually nothing.

“The best way to do it is find something in a smaller sale that’s completely mis-catalogued, and no one’s spotted it,” he says. “Maybe it can be bought for way less than it’s worth. But it works both ways, because often you find things that [sell for] far more than they ought to, because you've got several people thinking they’ve made a fantastic discovery.”

Last January, a drawing “recently recognized by a number of leading scholars as an autograph work by Raphael” sold at Sotheby’s New York for $795,000.

In 2015, a New Jersey auction house estimated a painting at $500 to $800; it sold for $870,000 after two bidders correctly identified the work as a Rembrandt.

Similarly, in 2007 a painting described as a 17th century copy of a Rembrandt was valued at about $3,000 at a regional auction house in England; it sold for about $4.5 million, after which it was also authenticated as the real thing. The Getty Center in Los Angeles later purchased the work for a reported $25 million.