A small drawing of a young lion made by Rembrandt was sold on Wednesday at Sotheby’s in New York for almost 18 million dollars, more than 15 million euros. It has therefore become the artist’s most valuable work on paper ever sold at auction.
The old record for a work on paper by Rembrandt was $3.7 million. Sotheby’s had set an ambitious target and predicted a return of at least $15 million. After the successful autumn auctions, this sale is a new indication that confidence in the art market has returned after a years-long dip.
The unsigned chalk sketch on a small sheet of brown paper was the last privately owned drawing of a lion by Rembrandt. The five other surviving drawings depicting lions, dating from the late 1630s to the 1640s, are in museum collections in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
Thomas S.Kaplan
An unknown bidder trumped a few telephone bidders on Wednesday afternoon, it can be seen whether a by Sotheby’s filmed report of the auction. The seller was Thomas S. Kaplan, an American historian who became a billionaire trading commodities. He and his wife Daphne own the Leiden Collectionwith no fewer than seventeen paintings by Rembrandt and about two hundred other Dutch masters, the largest private collection of seventeenth-century Dutch painting.
He will donate the proceeds from the drawing, Kaplan’s first Rembrandt purchase ever Pantheraa foundation co-founded by Kaplan for the conservation of lions and other wild cats. At the end of September, Kaplan told in The Art Newspaper is working on an IPO for its Leiden Collection. An initiative to democratize Dutch painting, he said. “In my opinion, the best way to promote Rembrandt is to give millions, perhaps tens of millions, of ordinary people the opportunity to own a Rembrandt.”
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