A Private UK Painting Is Being Recast as a Rembrandt, Challenging Chicago’s “Old Man with a Gold Chain”
A quiet dispute over a single face — an “attractive Old Man,” as one scholar calls him — is once again testing the fault lines between connoisseurship and technical analysis. Dutch art historian Gary Schwartz has argued that a painting in a private UK collection should be recognized as an authentic work by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), aligning it closely with “Old Man with a Gold Chain” (1631) at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Schwartz’s attribution, presented in connection with a talk on Monday at the National Gallery in London, centers on a canvas owned by collector Francis Newman. Late last year, the Art Institute displayed the canvas alongside a panel version bearing the same title, inviting close comparison and, inevitably, renewed questions about authorship.
The painting’s history reads like a case study in how reputations are made — and unmade — in Old Master scholarship. The canvas was credited to Rembrandt in 1898, when Newman’s great-grandfather purchased it. That confidence shifted in 1912, after a panel painting was discovered. The eminent German art historian Wilhelm Bode then labeled the canvas “a clever reproduction,” a judgment that helped push the work into decades of uncertainty.
Schwartz, who has just published “Dutch Painting” for Thames & Hudson’s “World of Art” series, contends that Bode’s dismissal rested on assertion rather than argument. More importantly, he proposes a different explanation for the canvas’s striking quality. If Rembrandt had been asked to supply a replica of a successful composition, Schwartz suggests, the most efficient method would not necessarily have been to hand the task to a pupil and then revise it. Instead, Rembrandt could have repeated his own process while the sequence of decisions was still “fresh in mind and hand.”
In Schwartz’s view, the Newman canvas supports that scenario because it shows no evidence of the kind of corrective intervention one might expect if a master were refining a student’s work.
Newman, for his part, has described living with the painting as an exercise in ambiguity. “My view is it’s always been a mystery,” he said, adding that the uncertainty allowed him to enjoy the work at home “and not have the responsibility of its potential importance.”
The Art Institute of Chicago has not shifted its position. The museum continues to classify the canvas as a copy, pointing to findings from infrared scans, X-rays, and pigment analysis. At the same time, it has acknowledged that scholarship on the purpose and authorship of such replicas — whether workshop products, later imitations, or versions made by the artist — remains in motion.
For museums and collectors alike, the stakes are more than semantic. Attribution shapes how a painting is conserved, exhibited, insured, and understood within an artist’s development. In this case, the argument also touches a larger question that has shadowed Rembrandt studies for generations: where, exactly, does the master end and the workshop begin — and what kinds of “copies” might still be, in a meaningful sense, original?
