A long-lost masterpiece by Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn is heading to the auction block — and restorers say a deliberate act of censorship hid one of its most striking details for centuries: a man in a turban and a naked child.
The painting, “Let the Little Children Come Unto Me,” was completed in 1627. In 2014, it quietly sold at a Cologne auction house for about $1.99 million after being misidentified as the work of an anonymous 17th-century Netherlandish artist.
But an Amsterdam art dealer recognized the young man lurking in the background as Rembrandt himself, alongside members of his family.
Restoration work subsequently stripped away layers of overpainting added by an unknown person.
This exposed a series of deliberate alterations: a central bearded figure, whom viewers had seen in a plain Dutch cap, was originally wearing a turban beneath the paint. A child, initially dressed in traditional clothing, can be seen half-naked in the original rendering.
Experts say the turban marked the figure as an Eastern man of non-Christian faith, and that Rembrandt placed him alongside Jewish and Christian figures to send a message of religious tolerance.
Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon said this was in keeping with Rembrandt’s affiliation with the Remonstrants, a group that supported religious tolerance and acceptance at the time.
This occurred when the Dutch Republic was divided over religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War in neighboring German territories sent waves of refugees into Holland, creating tensions between liberal Protestants and orthodox Calvinists.
In a Sotheby’s video titled “The Refugee Story at the Heart of an Unfinished Rembrandt Masterpiece,” Mr. Dixon says, “I think this picture shows us he was all about love from the start. He’s a painter who says yes. He says yes to life. He says yes to helping those in need. Yes to greeting other people with your heart. Yes to Jesus saying, ‘Suffer the little children.’ I think it’s a wonderful document of who this wonderful artist was.”
The painting is now estimated between $10 million and $15 million and goes on public view at Sotheby’s London on Friday ahead of the July 1 sale.
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