A new Getty show offers tricks for telling the difference between master and pupils
By CANDACE JACKSON
A show that opened this week at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles features dozens of authentic Rembrandt drawings—and just as many that aren't. The idea is to reveal to museum-goers the tricks experts and art scholars use to identify his unsigned artwork, something the museum world rarely publicizes.
The "fake" Rembrandts in the Getty's show are all drawings attributed to the Dutch master painter for hundreds of years, until as recently as a few years ago. Over the past 30 years, new scholarship and cataloguing techniques have helped scholars determine that at least half of the more than 1,000 "Rembrandt" drawings were by others.
One reason for all the confusion: Rembrandt had one of the largest teaching practices in his day, with at least 50 pupils studying closely alongside him in his sprawling Amsterdam studio. The curriculum included close imitations of his style and subject matter, says Lee Hendrix, the Getty curator for the show.
In the 17th century, some students eventually became more famous than Rembrandt, though of course that's not true today. (In the latter years of his life, Rembrandt's naturalistic style fell out of favor with wealthy patrons, who came to prefer a more flattering, less realistic painting, says Ms. Hendrix.) The Getty show features early training drawings by several of his best-known pupils, including Ferdinand Bol.
Another problem for scholars has been that although Rembrandt drew prolifically, very few of his drawings are signed. Scholars have used the signed drawings, and drawings connected to signed paintings, to find themes and symbols common to the unsigned work. These characteristics—like his use of storytelling, expressive faces and directional light— form the basis for determining modern historians which unsigned works are actually Rembrandts.
"Most people see [authenticating artwork] as a sort of scary, mystical process," says Ms. Hendrix. "It's not."
The Getty has organized the show in several galleries. In each, it has paired drawings side by side, on the left a real Rembrandt and on the right a work done by a student, with text explaining the clues to authorship. There's a central room that viewers can visit and revisit to check, via touch-screen video and text, the tips for identifying Rembrandts.
One pair includes one drawing that depicts St. John the Baptist preaching to a group (Rembrandt often painted biblical subjects), another of St. Paul preaching. On the left, Ms. Hendrix points out, the listeners' eight faces each have a distinct expression (bored, fascinated, confused, skeptical). In the other, the listeners are roughly sketched, their faces similar. These drawings were chosen to illustrate Rembrandt's tendency to focus on facial expressions.
Several pairs at the Getty depict the same nude model or street scene, but drawn from slightly different angles, a tip-off to scholars that one might not be a Rembrandt. Ms. Hendrix says the master would often join his students in drawing exercises—but of course would have a slightly different view, depending on where he was standing. Two drawings titled "A Quack and His Public" roughly sketch a snake-oil salesman putting on a show for a street crowd. For years they were both thought to be Rembrandts, but the one painted from a side view shows a defined emotion in the charlatan's face, while student Gerbrand van den Eeckhout has drawn the man from behind, with no expressions on faces in the crowd, Ms. Hendrix says.
Further confusing the matter is that some drawings even feature corrections done by Rembrandt himself, or lines drawn to show students what they should have done.
The exhibition is one of several devoted to the artist's work opening soon in Southern California. On Jan. 9 a show featuring Rembrandt prints will open at the Hammer Museum in L.A. On Jan. 22, the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego opens a show focusing on Rembrandt's New Testament prints from the 1650s. The Getty show closes Feb. 28 and won't travel: The drawings are too delicate.
Ms. Hendrix says that even though scholars generally agree that the drawings designated as Rembrandts in the Getty's show are legit, "in the end, it is always hypothetical."
Write to Candace Jackson at candace.jackson@wsj.com
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