Now almost universally accepted as an authentic, previously unknown early Rembrandt, the picture would be valued in the tens of millions. He paid $173,000, nearly seven times the high estimate. Six, fueled by a burning desire to make a name for himself independent of his celebrated family - and, not incidentally, make a killing in the market at the same time - snapped up the misattributed picture at Christie’s auction. Rembrandt’s gorgeous 1637 “ Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat” in the UCLA Hammer Museum’s collection handily demonstrates the savvy painterly device. Together, the techniques injected an appearance of spatial volume into the heavy flatness of starched collars. Second, somewhere along the collar’s edge he would make a small piece of lace curl up and away from the velvet or satin fabric of the garment beneath it. To render such intricate lace in a manner that would give it visually tactile materiality, the artist would often do two things.įirst, he painted an area solid white, then filled in with light-absorbing black paint the negative spaces between the design’s woven threads, giving painterly heft to thin air. Later, Six also realized that the extravagant collar, symbol of social and economic status, betrayed an early example of a distinctive Rembrandt trait. The unsigned painting’s date had been nailed down by the briefly popular style of flashy lace collar worn by the pictured aristocrat. Rembrandt was still a young 20-something, hardly established enough to have developed a circle of followers or imitators between 16. A portrait of a fashionable young aristocrat looked too good for such a minor auction, while the artist-attribution - “Circle of Rembrandt” - made no sense. Four years ago, the young art historian and dealer (actually Jan Six XI) stumbled upon a discovery while almost absent-mindedly thumbing through a Christie’s auction catalog for a day sale in London. Jan Six is also the name of his descendent, 10 generations on, whose story is one main thread of the documentary. 6, and Jan Six happens to be the name of the sitter in one of Rembrandt’s most celebrated portraits - a powerful lawyer, politician and friend of the artist. 22, including Laemmle Virtual Cinema in Los Angeles.) The date of Wednesday’s debut is Jan.

streaming-service launch on Virtual Cinema, hosted by Film Forum in New York. It also provides a bit of unadvertised wit for the film’s U.S. Portraiture, including self-portraiture, was his early avenue into the relentless demands of intimate scrutiny. Wielding an incomparable, sometimes even astounding facility with the brush, Rembrandt merged close and candid observation of the world around him with inventive theatrical narratives drawn from myth, history and the Bible. Ninth child of a prosperous miller and a baker’s daughter, he proceeded to set the absurdly prosperous city on its sophisticated ear. The ambitious young painter from the modest university town of Leiden, launching pad for the cultivation of the Asian tulip throughout Europe, came to Amsterdam at the age of 25. The film’s protagonists are art collectors, dealers, museum curators, historians, connoisseurs, auctioneers, government officials - most but not all of them men, and all focused attentively on Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669). Her cinematographers, Sander Snoep and Gregor Meerman, are superlative, especially in detailed scrutiny of paintings. The success of that much-admired earlier film likely gave her unusual access to the art-world elite who open up in “My Rembrandt.” Hoogendijk knows her way around Dutch Golden Age painting and today’s complicated cultural landscape, having spent a decade documenting the renovation and expansion of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’s incomparable repository. Passion for an artist’s work comes in many forms. One lesson of the film, ably helmed by director Oeke Hoogendijk, is that to love an artist’s work is to possess it, whether physically, intellectually, emotionally or any combination thereof - including, perhaps, corruptly. The 2019 documentary “My Rembrandt,” available for streaming beginning Wednesday, is less a film about the iconic 17th century Dutch painter of the film’s title than it is an acute, often fascinating and occasionally puzzling rumination on aspects of the other titular word - “my.”

Dutch portrait painter crossword