PORTRAIT BY REMBRANDT'S COLLEAGUE TO SELL AT BONHAMS FOR £500,000

Friday, 06 October 2006 09:14

LONDON - A stunning portrait by Dutch artist Jan Lievens (1607 – 1674) is to be sold at Bonhams this winter.  ‘Portrait of a young girl in profile’ is expected to fetch between £300,000 – 500,000 at Bonhams’ Sale of Old Master Paintings on 6 December 2006 at 101 New Bond Street, London.  In some respects Lievens was better than Rembrandt.

Considered a child prodigy of his time, Jan Lievens was apprenticed alongside Rembrandt van Rijn in the studio of Pieter Lastman, and the two artists worked closely together between 1625 and 1631.  These early works show borrowings of composition and subject, and the two used such a similar technique that unsigned works from this period can be difficult to ascribe accurately.  Constantin Huygens, one of the most notable patrons of the arts in the United Province, ranked the two artists together in his 1631 autobiography, when he referred to “a pair of noble and young painters.”  Indeed, in comparing the two artists’ talents, Huygens went so far as to say that in some respects Lievens was better than Rembrandt due to his magnificent invention, daring subjects and greater designs.

Late in 1631 the two artists parted company, Rembrandt traveling to Amsterdam and Lievens to England.  It was here, at the English court, where he came under the influence of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, whose Flemish baroque style he went on to employ in his later paintings.  In 1644 Lievens moved to Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, and gained an international reputation through his readiness to adapt to the prevailing baroque taste.

While history has tended to overlook Lievens as yet another Rembrandt follower, art historians have recently argued that his early work is equal to that of Rembrandt and that he was an innovatory force to be reckoned with in his own right.  His emerging importance was made clear to the art market when in December 1990 Bonhams sold Lievens’s Portrait of a boy in Persian dress’ for a world record hammer price of £530,000.  This painting and the portrait to be offered by Bonhams in December have come from the Bett Collection, which was compiled in the 1920s by a connoisseur who chose to value quality over quantity at a time when many were doing the opposite.