Rembrandt’s "fake" was created in his workshop - perhaps it is the original

It turned out that the head of the bearded man was made from the same wood panel that was used for Rembrandt’s Andromeda.

It was discovered that the tiny painting of a tired, melancholic old man, which was long rejected as a fake and sent to the basement of the museum, comes from the workshop of Rembrandt and may have been created by himself.

In Ashmole Museum in Oxford will be exhibited "Head of a Bearded Man” [the ext] (around 1630), transferred to the fund in 1951 as Rembrandt panels. In 1981, authorship was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist’s work, with virtually the final say in attribution.

“They saw it with their own eyes and decided it was not a painting by Rembrandt,” said curator of Northern European art, En Van Camp. "They said that it could be an imitation in the style of Rembrandt, but it may have been written before the end of the 17th century, that is, even during Rembrandt’s lifetime."

Disappointed curators of the museum moved her to the basement floor. Van Camp joined the museum in 2015 and learned about a postcard-sized painting that “nobody wanted to talk about because it was a fake Rembrandt.”

En was involved in organizing a major exhibition of the young Rembrandt in February and March 2020. She was always worried that the panel might be genuine. “This is what Rembrandt did. He painted tiny sketches of the heads of old people with a miserable, melancholic, pensive look. This is very typical of what Rembrandt did in Leiden around 1630 ”.

The wood panel was analyzed by Peter Klein, one of the world’s leading dendrochronologists, and it was found that it was made from the same wood that was used to create Rembrandt’s Andromeda (chained to the rocks), which is located at Mauritshuis in The Hague and also for portrait of Rembrandt’s mother by Jan Lievens, located in the State Museum of Art in Dresden, Germany. Both paintings were painted around 1630 when the painters, childhood friends, were working in Leiden in the Netherlands.

Klein concluded that the wood panel was carved from oak felled in the Baltics in 1618–28. “By taking at least two years for the aging of the tree, we can accurately date the portrait to 1620-30 years,” he said.

Ann Van Camp says all research points to the panel belongs to Rembrandt’s workshop. Further research will be conducted to determine if there is evidence of Rembrandt’s involvement in the work.