The portrait of a young man with penetrating brown eyes that had been languishing in storage at the Brooklyn Art Museum for decades was one of a list of artworks earmarked for possible sale. The painting had not been shown since 1945, and its attribution had been questioned. Indeed, ARTKABINETT social network for fine fine art collectors has never seen the work hanging in the museum galleries.
Then along came Richard Aste, who was named the museum’s curator of European art a year ago. When he started his job, one of the first things he did was review the department’s holdings, including the portrait, a 4-by-6-inch work on oak panel.
It has been in the collection since 1932, a bequest from the estate of Michael Friedsam, president of B. Altman & Company, the department store. Back then it was thought to have been a self-portrait from around 1631 by Rembrandt’s first pupil, the Dutch painter, Gerrit Dou. But in the 1990s scholars doubted that it was actually by Dou and demoted the painting to “contemporary copy.”
When Mr. Aste first saw the painting, he said, he was “struck by how finely executed it was,” adding that it “was so meticulous, I knew if it wasn’t by Dou, then it was by some other master.”
So he sought other opinions. Otto Naumann, a Manhattan dealer, thought it was by Dou, Mr. Aste said. So did George Wachter, director of Sotheby’s old masters painting department worldwide. Mr. Wachter suggested that Mr. Aste bring the painting to Sotheby’s, where it could be seen — along with a Dou that was on the block — by scholars during the sales in January.
Off it went to Sotheby’s, where it was examined by Peter C. Sutton, executive director of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., and Ronni Baer, the senior curator of European paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A Dou scholar, Ms. Baer was also a curator of the Dou retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2000, a show that included new scholarship along with a handful of self-portraits. Both Mr. Sutton and Ms. Baer told Mr. Aste the portrait was genuine.
Now the painting is hanging in the museum’s European paintings gallery, where the label reads “Portrait of a Young Man (Self-Portrait?), by Gerrit Dou.” And Mr. Aste’s next project is to determine whether it is in fact a self-portrait. “If it is, then Dou would have been 18 when he painted it,” he said. “And that would make this the artist’s earliest surviving self-portrait, executed when Dou was working in Rembrandt’s studio in Leiden.”
