A chalk sketch of a young lion on a sheet of brown paper, a fraction larger than a smartphone. Sotheby’s, which is auctioning the drawing in New York on February 4, is expecting a proceeds of between 13 and 17 million euros. According to the auction house, such an important Rembrandt drawing has not been offered for sale in years. Of the fifteen surviving animal drawings by his hand, it is also the last in private hands.
The seller is Thomas S. Kaplan, an American historian who became a billionaire trading commodities. When he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with his mother as a six-year-old, he became captivated by Rembrandt, Kaplan said in a 2017 interview with NRC. He now owns seventeen paintings by Rembrandt, more than anyone in the world. Its so-called Leiden Collectionwith hundreds of paintings by Dutch masters from the seventeenth century, constantly travels the world and was on display last summer in the H’ART Museum in Amsterdam.
Symbol
In the seventeenth century, lions frequently figured in heraldic, mythological and biblical representations as a symbol of power, strength and national unity. But how did artists in the Republic draw or paint an animal that they could not study in real life? They often used existing imaginations. How unrealistic these examples sometimes were can clearly be seen in a print by the young Rembrandt, Jerome reading. The lion in this etching dating from 1634 resembles a dog.
Rembrandt: Reading Jerome.
Rembrandt: Jerome reading in an Italian landscape.
A few years later, Rembrandt could clearly have studied living lions. Six drawings by his hand have been preserved, one oil sketch and the print dating from 1653 Jerome reading in an Italian landscapeall with lifelike-looking lions.
For the catalog text, Sotheby’s received information from two Dutch historical researchers who previously conducted research into the presence of lions in the Republic. Laurien van der Werff published three articles about the presence of lions at fairs and annual fairs in the seventeenth century. Michiel Roscam Abbing is the author of Rembrandt’s elephant – in the wake of Hansken (2016), the life story of the elephant brought from Batavia on a return fleet, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1633 and was drawn by Rembrandt in 1637. This trick-or-treating female elephant traveled through Europe for many years as a tourist attraction.
Hansken was the only living elephant on the European continent in the mid-seventeenth century. More lions were probably brought to Europe at the time, says Van der Werff. Based on archival research, she discovered that Amsterdam residents alone could admire lions seven times for a fee between 1644 and 1660.
These Atlas lions, a subspecies that is now extinct in the wild, came to the Republic from North Africa on trade and admiralty ships. Touring groups showed exotic animals in tents, as well as bearded women, armless people, obese children and other abnormalities. In 1653, Jan van Goyen drew a village festival with a tent advertising an elephant and tightrope walkers.
Fairground animals
For artists like Rembrandt, such fairground animals were essential objects of study, says Roscam Abbing. The three-week annual fair in Amsterdam always took place in the autumn, within walking distance of his house.
Nothing is known about the young lion that Rembrandt drew around 1640, says Van der Werff. She wrote an article about the owners of the Het Witte Fortuijn lodging house on the Zeedijk in Amsterdam, who in 1656 bought a lion that had come with Michiel de Ruyter’s fleet. She also found a report of a lion that came to the Republic by ship from the North African city state of Salé in 1682. Along the way, the lion was fed live ermines.
Elephant Hansken and her companions walked from fair to fair, lions were transported in a cage on a horse-drawn cart, says Roscam Abbing. He found a report from 1645 by a Harderwijk regent about a lion that arrived in Hoorn by ship. Something went wrong during unloading and the lion was able to fatally injure a boy, despite the cage in which he was locked.
The lion drawing was his first Rembrandt purchase in 2005, says Thomas Kaplan from New York. He donates the proceeds to Pantheraa foundation co-founded by him for the conservation of lions, tigers and other big cats. “Wildlife conservation is my only passion that surpasses Rembrandt.” With the sale, the Rembrandt collector hopes to interest more people in nature conservation.
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