Art: A New Rembrandt

Last week the art world got news of a major find: a previously uncatalogued Rembrandt that seemed to bear all the authentic marks of the master’s work. A few collectors and experts even got a chance to look at it briefly when it was put up for auction at a London gallery. Entitled The Flight into Egypt, the small (20 in. by 16 in.) painting showed Joseph leading a donkey bearing the Virgin and Child out of a dark wood, their faces lit by the glow of a lantern hanging from the pommel of the saddle. In one of his more familiar etchings, Rembrandt had used the same idea.

The painting turned up when Britain’s 87-year-old Charles John Robert Hep-burn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, 21st Baron Clinton,* decided to turn his big Devonshire manor into tin agricultural college and dispose of the family paintings. Flight into Egypt had been bought by an 18th Century Clinton ancestor, had hung in the manor’s billiard room almost ever since. Nineteenth Century cataloguers had somehow missed the painting, and the Clintons had never bothered to brag about it.

Art lovers elsewhere would presumably have to wait a while to see the new Rembrandt. London’s Leggatt Bros. Gallery, which paid an auction price of $28,000 for the picture, had not yet announced what they were going to do with it, meanwhile refused to let it be photographed.

*Distant kin to General Sir Henry Clinton, who was commander in chief of the British forces in North America during the last three years of the American Revolution.