The $250 Rembrandt (ctd.)
January 18 2018
Picture: AHN
Remember the story of the discovery at auction of one of Rembrandt's Senses? It surfaced at auction in the US, with an estimate of just $250, and is now in the Leiden Collection. Now the three brothers who inherited the painting from their mother have described their decision not to sell it in a 'yard sale', and how they found out it had actually sold for $1.1m:
After their mom died in 2010, the three brothers cleaned out her house and decided to sell the items that they didn’t have a need for.
“We had a garage sale, but there were a few things like the china and silver that looked very nice and we thought, well, we don’t really want to just give them away,” [...]
The small painting was unsettling to Ned Landau during his childhood, and he recalled “As a kid I thought, ‘why did we have a painting like that in our dining room?'”
Their mother’s nicer items lived in Roger Landau’s basement for four years before approaching an appraiser, John Nye, who gave them an estimate of a few hundred dollars for the painting.
More here.
