No Jan Lievens. That is the opinion of the PAN Amsterdam judges about the seventeenth-century boy’s portrait that would be offered from Saturday at the PAN Amsterdam art and antiques fair as an unknown painting by Jan Lievens (1607-1674). On Wednesday it was announced that the portrait baptized ‘Winter Prince’, with an asking price of 3.3 million, would probably be the showpiece of the fair.
The eight judges for the old masters, all very experienced art experts, unanimously came to the conclusion on Friday that there is insufficient grounds to attribute the portrait to Lievens. The general chairman of the inspection committees at PAN Jan-Rudolph de Lorm (also director of the Singer Laren museum) announced this on Friday evening. “It is definitely a seventeenth-century painting, but more research is needed for an attribution,” he says.
Renialme Fine Art, the new Amsterdam-London art dealer, has decided to show the painting after all. “It’s just not for sale,” says owner Gillis Tak Labrijn. He did not expect that opinions about the painting would differ so much.
Renialme wanted to offer the unsigned and undated panel as a portrait of Lievens, painted around 1630, who was Rembrandt’s studiomate in his younger years in Leiden. Lievens’ paintings from that time are very popular.
According to Renialme, it would be a portrait of the youthful Prince Maurice of the Palatinate, the fourth son of Frederick V, the former king of Bohemia. With his fur hat and fur-lined cloak, the boy would have been portrayed as an emblem of the concept of ‘winter’.
The German Lievens expert Bernhard Schnackenburg and David de Witt, curator at the Rembrandthuis Museum in Amsterdam, supported the attribution to Lievens, although they differed in opinion about the dating.
Twin brothers
Interestingly, De Witt’s twin brother Lloyd, who is working on a catalog raisonné of Lievens, has a different opinion about the painting. Lloyd de Witt is a curator at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. He is considered the specialist of Leiden painters. When asked, De Witt says about the painting offered by Renialme: “I would rather think of a Flemish painter. Moreover, winter is always depicted by an old man.”
Tak Labrijn did not consult Lloyd de Winter for two reasons, he says. “I had never spoken to him before, and I assumed David had coordinated his opinion about the portrait with his brother.”
Tak Labrijn told NRC to have found the painting with an heir of two dentists from Paris. In reality, the painting was auctioned on June 17 at the small Parisian auction house Duval Encheres. There it was offered as “attributed to Michaelina Wautier (1604-1689)”, a beloved Flemish painter. It was sold for 31,200 euros.
The 36th edition of PAN Amsterdam, this year with 125 art and antique dealers, starts on Saturday in the RAI with an opening for invited guests. The fair lasts until Sunday, November 26.