[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Old-Man-with-a-Gold-Chain.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA painting long thought to be a \u201cworkshop copy\u201d of a cherished Rembrandt in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago has been attributed to Rembrandt himself by a scholar with significant credit to his claim.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs reported by the Guardian<\/em>, Gary Schwartz, who has written books on Rembrandt and Dutch painting and will deliver a talk on Monday at the National Gallery in London, said a canvas in a private collection in the UK is in fact a Rembrandt in the same way as Old Man with a Gold Chain\u00a0<\/em>(1631) at the Art Institute. Both of the works (the former on panel, as opposed to the canvas owned by collector Francis Newman) share the same title and were brought together for a display that opened late last year at the museum in Chicago. The canvas has been considered a replica copy \u201clikely by one of the students in [Rembrandt\u2019s] workshop for the competitive Amsterdam art market,\u201d according to the Art Institute.<\/p>\n \n\tBut Schwartz told the Guardian<\/em>: \u201cIf Rembrandt had a customer for a replica of his attractive Old Man, what would be the most effective and efficient way of making it? Assigning it to a pupil, whose work would have to be corrected\u2014and the Newman painting shows no sign of corrections\u2014or re-enacting the steps he had just taken, when they were still fresh in mind and hand? Surely the latter makes more sense. This assumption accounts for the outstanding quality of the canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe canvas was credited to Rembrandt in 1898, when Newman\u2019s great-grandfather bought it. When the panel painting was discovered in 1912, however, the canvas was deemed \u201ca clever reproduction\u201d by the eminent German art historian Wilhelm Bode. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut Bode offered \u201cno serious reasoning for his contention,\u201d according to Schwartz, who just published Dutch Painting<\/em> as part of Thames & Hudson\u2019s series of books titled \u201cWorld of Art.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tNewman, who owns the contested work, said, \u201cMy view is it\u2019s always been a mystery. I\u2019ve enjoyed the mystery because it meant I could enjoy it on the wall \u2026 and not have the responsibility of its potential importance.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe\u00a0Art\u00a0Institute of Chicago maintains that the canvas is a copy, citing infrared scans, X-rays, and pigment analysis, according to the Guardian<\/em>. But the museum acknowledged that \u201cthe conversation about the purpose and authorship of these copies continues to evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/rembrandt-attribution-art-institute-chicago-1234779406\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Old-Man-with-a-Gold-Chain.jpg?w=1024″] A painting long thought to be a \u201cworkshop copy\u201d of a cherished Rembrandt in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago has been attributed to Rembrandt himself by a scholar with significant credit to his claim. As reported by the Guardian, Gary Schwartz, who has written books on Rembrandt and Dutch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1856492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1856492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1856492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1856492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1856492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1856492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1856492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}