New Rembrandt Discovered

An Amsterdam museum announced on Friday (December 2) that advanced X-ray techniques had revealed a new Rembrandt painting. The painting was previously attributed to an unknown painter in Rembrandt’s entourage around 1620.

The work is called ‚The Old Man with the Beard.’

When scientists examined the painting with x-rays, they were surprised to find an unfinished self-portrait under the painting.

[Joris Dik, Scientist]:
„This painting was discovered recently and attributed to Rembrandt by leading Rembrandt expert Ernst van de Wetering partially based on the x-ray image of this painting, because below the surface of this painting is actually an unfinished self-portrait of Rembrandt and that’s something we discovered using advanced x-ray technology.“

It was quite usual for painters to reuse their canvas, and without x-ray technology, the Rembrandt self-portrait could have remained unknown forever.

[Joris Dik, Scientist]:
„Many of Rembrandt’s paintings have been reused and the painter usually recycled the carriers of his paintings, panels or canvases and painted on top of existing compositions and that’s also the case with this painting. Through conventional analysis we found out that the painting had been changed, had been altered, but it wasn’t clear whether there was a completely full-blown second painting underneath or whether the surface painting had been worked a little bit, had been reworked, so that’s something that we found out using advanced x-ray techniques.“

He added it would be difficult to actually see the the famous artist’s newly discovered self-portrait.

[Joris Dik, Scientist]:
„So will we ever be able to see the painting underneath? It’s difficult. First of all, the paining underneath is not finished, it’s an unfinished self-portrait that was finished very early in its stage, so we only have a very rough sketch of a self-portrait of Rembrandt underneath the surface. The second thing of course is that we need x-rays, we need penetrative imaging technique to visualize what lies hidden below the surface“

The self-portrait was revealed when the painting was scanned at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and ESRF in Grenoble, using Macro-scanning X-Ray Fluorescence spectrometry.

XRF technology detects the pigments in hidden layers of paint, making it possible to record over painted compositions photographically.

The painting is currently owned by an anonymous private collector and will be loaned to the Rembrandthuis museum, which will exhibit it from May to July next year.

Foto: NTD