![]() “The thieves clambered up a museum lightning rod, removed a window on the upper story and thus got into the building,” reported a German newspaper at the time, adding that the burglars took several works. In 1909, that aristocrat, Wilhelm Ernst, loaned the painting to the Grand Ducal Museum, in Weimar, Germany. First recorded in the collection of King Willem II, it was passed down through royal hands to a German grand duke in the early 20th century. Schwartz’s narrative of “Rembrandt in a Red Beret,” begins in 1823. Schwartz said he didn’t know whether Eller plans to sell the painting, but its market value would increase substantially if the work were regarded as an original Rembrandt, made solely by the artist’s hand. The painting’s current owner, Johann Eller, commissioned Schwartz to write the book. In his book, Schwartz makes a case that earlier scholars unfairly discredited the work he is convinced that it is an original. To coincide with the exhibition, Schwartz, a Dutch-American Rembrandt scholar, published a book, “Rembrandt in a Red Beret: The Vanishings and Reappearances of a Self-Portrait,” which used declassified government documents and formerly untapped sources to reconstruct the painting’s long and winding history.Īlthough it is undeniably an image of the 17th-century master, scholars have disagreed about whether the painting is a self-portrait a portrait by one of Rembrandt’s star pupils, perhaps Ferdinand Bol or a 19th-century imitation. ![]() The painting previously hung there from 1850 to 1879, when it was owned by Prince Hendrik of the Netherlands, who acquired it after the death of his father, King Willem II. Garver Fund.This month, that work, depicting Rembrandt when he was about 37, is being displayed in public for the first time in more than a half a century, at Escher in Het Paleis, a former royal palace. John Freake” was purchased from the museum's Sarah C. Rice, a retired Worcester lawyer, is a trustee of the museum. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary” was the gift of Mr. Freake and Baby Mary is not only one of the greatest American paintings but one of the most exquisite primitives of any epoch, comparing favorably with early French and English anonymous masters.” That of the mother was shifted to increase its protective and supporting effect, while that of the child was raised to reach toward the mother.ĭaniel Catton Rich, director of the museum, described the works as “the most important acquisition in paintings since the purchase of our Rembrandt five years ago. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary” show that the left hands of each were repainted. In addition to a typically primitive preoccupation with the careful delineation of detail (the lace of the collars is identifiable as to type and source), the artist was intent upon the more difficult problem of combining the details into an expressive whole. ![]() Making no effort to approximate the English style of the time, but working from an innate feeling for color and pattern, the artist belongs to the group of journeymen painters, who, without intending to, created the first distinctively American art.Ī degree of stiffness and naiveté remains in the Freake portraits as hallmarks of the style, but where many examples are only quaint and awkward, these hold their own not only as visually handsome objects but also as successful efforts to capture the personalities of the sitters. The unknown artist may have been a sign painter in the local tradition that involved considerable pictorial mastery. The portraits are of the, same size, and composed to hang harmoniously as a pair as well as individually. The youth of the mother as well as a strong family tradition supports the probability that Baby Mary's birth was the first, recorded on May 6, 1674, of several recorded by the family. The one of the mother and child bears a faint inscripcription, “AETATIS SUAE 6 MOTH.” Sigourney was descended from the Freakes.īoth portraits can be dated November, 1674, with some assurance. Andrew Sigourney, who inherited them through her husband's line and in whose home in Princeton, Mass., the pictures hung until her death last year. The pictures were the property of the four children of Mrs. ![]()
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