An Album of Expertises

›Rembrandt‹ or ›Non-Rembrandt‹? This picture embodies the tides in recent Rembrandt scholarship,
and this picture also did once belong to ›our‹ mysterious collection

(Picture: DS)

A mysterious album has come into my possession: in a Basel secondhand shop I recently found this album. It’s a photo album that obviously was meant to document an art collection, put together before the year of 1937; and the one peculiarity (and the one reason that made me decide to acquire this album) was and is the fact that expert’s expertises relating to each of the 25 paintings that once formed that collection, paintings, according to the expertises, by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Veronese, Tintoretto and others, had also been glued into this very album. Expertises mostly by Willem Vogelsang, but also by Abraham Bredius, Gustav Glück, Gerrit David Gratama and Cornelis Hoofstede de Groot.

What to make with this album? Well, since this is obviously an interesting document for everyone interested in the history of collecting, we will have to answer three questions: Whose album, whose collection this once was; what we are looking at (if looking at the photographs of 25 works of art), and last but not least the question where these pictures are now.

One picture has become notoriously famous in recent years, since this one picture, the one Rembrandt from our album, had been excluded from Rembrandt’s oeuvre catalogue by the notoriously famous Rembrandt Research Project. But Ernst van de Wetering, who took over the project, and who was the one dissenting voice then, decided to reintegrate this picture, which we do see above (now: Kingston, Canada), into the oeuvre catalogue again (if with some slight reservations, since van de Wetering does not seem to consider such classifications as more than reasoned opinions anymore, albeit these opinions are now based on reflections on the probability of such attributions).

Attributed to Jan Vermeer van Delft by Willem Vogelsang (picture: DS)

Said this I have to say the following: My working hypothesis as to whose album this was, is that the collector was Werner Weisbach, who emigrated from Berlin to Basel in 1935 and who lived, besides his work as an independent scholar and writer, on from-time-to-time-selling works of art from his collection (see here).

Secondly: That the above Rembrandt may have been part of Weisbach’s collection is new: the history of that putative Rembrandt has to be updated (and the gap in provenance, if my hypothesis is correct, to be filled between: ›belonging to the Van Diemen gallery or estate‹, and ›acquired by the Hartsdale, New York, art dealer David Bingham‹).

Werner Weisbach (1873-1953)
(picture: sammlungen.hu-berlin.de)

Thirdly: The history of the whole Rembrandt Research Project, its changes in methodology, its, or better: van de Wetering’s introduction of ›Bayesian principles‹, crystallizes in the story of this one picture, which is why I am intending to use this picture as a methodological paradigm, as far as attributing is concerned, in the near future (especially as to a discussing of confirmation bias in the field of attributing). Not to mention the fact that, with our album, two expertises concerning that picture have come up (written by Willem Vogelsang and by Gustav Glück, the latter’s written in 1932).

Fourthly: The hypothesis that Weisbach was the collector has to be confirmed. I am intending to investigate the stories of the various paintings further; and I am doing so focussing, at the moment, on the history of the alleged ›Vermeer‹ from that mysterious collection (see picture; perhaps rather belonging to the interesting history of apocryphal ›Vermeers‹). Another picture, then also attributed to Vermeer (›Knee-length Portrait of an Elder Woman‹, exhibited in Berlin in 1909, but not being part of the album), Werner Weisbach had inherited from his father Valentin Weisbach.

Paul Ganz (1872-1954)
(picture: zb.uzh.ch)

(Update as by September 29, 2016: the Weisbach hypothesis has almost certainly to be dismissed; the investigation goes on…)

(Update as by January 8, 2017: the riddle is solved; the collector was Basel professor of art history Paul Ganz)

See also:

An Unknown »Vermeer«

An Expertise By Hofstede De Groot

(Picture: DS)

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