A Second “Old Man with a Gold Chain” Reopens a Classic Rembrandt Question in Chicago
In a quiet gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), a familiar face has acquired a double. Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Old Man with a Gold Chain” (1631) — a cornerstone of the museum’s collection since 1922 — is now displayed beside a second version that has long been treated as a workshop copy. Art historian Gary Schwartz is pressing a different claim: that the companion picture is an autograph replica painted by Rembrandt himself.
The side-by-side installation, titled “Double Dutch: A Rembrandt and a Workshop Copy,” makes the museum’s position plain. The wall text emphasizes that attribution remains unresolved, even as curators welcome the pairing as a rare chance to study two closely related works in the same space. The loaned painting, slightly smaller than the Chicago panel and executed on canvas, comes from the Sir Francis Newman Collection in the UK and will remain on view at the AIC through June 16.
After Chicago, the picture will travel to Germany, where it is slated to appear in “Rembrandt 1632: Creation of a Brand” at the Herzogliches Museum (Ducal Museum) in Gotha from September 6 to December 6. Justus Lange, acting director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and curator of the exhibition, plans to include the work at the Gotha stop as a “possible” autograph replica — a curatorial framing that acknowledges the debate without foreclosing it.
Schwartz’s argument touches a nerve that has shaped Rembrandt scholarship for decades: the instability of the artist’s catalogue and the difficulty of separating the master’s hand from the achievements of his studio. Rembrandt trained gifted pupils who learned by copying, by completing passages begun by their teacher, and by producing works that could circulate under the aura of his name. The result is a body of paintings that has invited generations of connoisseurship, disagreement, and periodic revision.
That revisionism has accelerated in the modern era. Earlier this month, researchers at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam authenticated “Vision of Zacharias in the Temple” (1633), owned by a private collector and dismissed as a copy in the early 1960s. The painting joins roughly 350 works currently accepted as Rembrandts — a number that has risen and fallen as new evidence and new methodologies have reshaped the field.
The most influential recalibration came through the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), which spent decades reassessing attributions. The project began by scrutinizing Abraham Bredius’s 1935 catalogue raisonné, which credited 624 paintings to Rembrandt, and ultimately removed more than half. Its longtime authority, the Dutch art historian Ernst van de Wetering, later reinstated 70 works in 2014 in “Rembrandt Painting Revisited,” the final volume of the RRP’s six-part survey.
For Schwartz, the Chicago “copy” raises a specific art-historical problem: whether Rembrandt made autograph replicas at all. He argues that an assumption against replicas has made it harder for scholars to accept a second “Old Man with a Gold Chain” as authentic. Schwartz points to internal disagreements within the RRP itself, noting that a replica was identified in the project’s early volumes, though Van de Wetering did not accept the conclusion.
Schwartz visited Chicago in late December to make his case informally to art historians and curators, moving through the museum with the group to consider other examples of autograph replicas. He describes the atmosphere of Rembrandt attribution as unusually combative, a field where consensus can feel less like discovery than like a hard-won truce.
For the AIC, the current display offers something rarer than certainty: a public view into how attribution is tested, argued, and sometimes overturned. With the loan’s next stop in Gotha already set, the question now is whether close looking — and the slow accumulation of scholarly persuasion — will shift the balance from “workshop” toward “Rembrandt.”
