A largely unknown and newly attributed Rembrandt painting slated to go under the hammer could fetch upwards of $18 million at Sotheby’s in London this December. “The Adoration of the Kings” (c. 1628), long overlooked as it was once misattributed to a student of the Rembrandt School rather than to the artist himself, has now been recognized as a critical work from his early career following an 18-month study conducted by the auction house.
The painting had been sold multiple times between 1714 and 1985 and identified as a work of the Rembrandt School in the 1960s, which resulted in its omission from scholarship and literature surrounding the artist and a comparatively meager five-figure valuation. The work resurfaced, with an attribution to an unnamed member of Rembrandt’s social or professional circle, at a Christie’s sale in Amsterdam in 2021, where it sold to an anonymous collector for £860,000 (~$1 million). According to Sotheby’s, consultations with multiple Rembrandt scholars concluded that it was an autograph work by the artist.
Rembrandt employed two light sources for the dusky scene depicted in “The Adoration of the Kings” — a lantern beyond the composition bathes infant Jesus and the visiting kings in the foreground with hues of warm brown, while the stark gray star of Bethlehem provides soft, cool highlights upon the armor and helmets across the middle and background of the dilapidated building. Infra-red imaging revealed Rembrandt’s multiple revisions of the composition, including the artist’s abandonment of a second soldier figure as well as various changes to the heads of the figures surrounding the infant, according to the auction house.
Rembrandt frequently created small-scale, monochromatic paintings with the intention of translating them into etchings during the 1630s, the early point in his career, and it’s likely that he intended to pursue the same path with “The Adoration of the Kings.” Instead, he chose to reuse the foreground group in an etching titled “The Presentation in the Temple with the Angel” (1630), though the figures are flipped due to the nature of printmaking.
Though the painting will be sold in a Sotheby’s Old Masters auction in London in December, it will be on view in Manhattan for New Yorkers to see from November 1 through November 12.
