A painting by the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Rembrandt van Rijn is heading to auction this December and could make in the region of £15 million. The Adoration of the Kings was the subject of an extensive research project at Sotheby’s over the past 18 months after it was sold at Christie’s Amsterdam in 2021 as ‘Circle of Rembrandt’, where it carried a substantially lower estimate of only €10,000-15,000. This new research has led specialists to conclude that the painting was in fact by the artist himself and therefore worth considerably more money.

The provenance of the painting can be traced back to the early eighteenth century. It was included in a 1714 inventory of an Amsterdam-based collector, Constantijn Ranst. Following this, it was sold in 1814 and again in 1822, after which it vanished from sight until the mid-20^th century. In 1955, it was acquired by Dutch collector Johannes Carel Hendrik Heldring. Museum exhibitions and scholarly publications from the 1950s included the work as by Rembrandt, however in 1960 a German art historian, Kurt Bauch, described the work as by the School of Rembrandt and left it out of his catalogue raisonné on the artist, based only on a black and white image he had seen of the work. According to Sotheby’s, after this the painting was “entirely overlooked and completely ignored in the Rembrandt literature”.

When it was sold by Christie’s Amsterdam in 2021, the painting sailed past its meagre estimate and made €860,000, suggesting that some may have spotted the potential in the work. Indeed, George Gordon, Sotheby’s Co-Chairman and specialist in Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings, said that bidders in 2021 “must have thought it was much better than the description and that it might well be a Rembrandt.”

The painting is a rare find, as most narrative scenes by the artist are already in institutions. Sotheby’s have suggested that the work was made when Rembrandt was living in Leiden in the late 1620s. Gordon said, “this sophisticated painting is in equal measure a product of Rembrandt’s brush and his intellect. All the hallmarks of his style in the late 1620s are evident both in the visible painted surface and in the underlying layers revealed by science, showing multiple changes in the course of its creation, and casting fresh light on how he thought.” One of the compositional changes that was spotted using infrared imaging technology was alterations to the protagonists’ heads towards the holy family, which Gordon describes as “tightening the composition for heightened psychological drama.”

The sizeable estimate this painting will be carrying when it comes to auction for the Old Master sales in December relates to the huge amount of money Rembrandt paintings have sold for in recent years. In July 2020, a self-portrait by the artist made £14.5 million (with fees) and at in 2018, an oil sketch for a head of Christ made £9.5 million (with fees) and was purchased for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The painting will be on view at Sotheby’s galleries in Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and London before its sale on 6^th December.