Studio of Rembrandt
Dutch Republic · Dutch Golden Age painting
The story
Studio of Rembrandt marks paintings made in Rembrandt's workshop by his pupils and assistants, often following his designs. He trained dozens of pupils, and the line between their pictures and his own has moved many times.
Works under this label show how. At the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Portrait of Rembrandt with a Gorget, painted around 1629, was long taken for his own self-portrait. In 1998 a technical examination found an underdrawing beneath it that followed the outlines of a near-identical panel in Nuremberg. The attributions were reversed. The Nuremberg picture is now considered the original, and the Mauritshuis version a very good copy by a pupil.
In Washington, the National Gallery of Art found during cleaning in the early 1990s that the Rembrandt signature on its Descent from the Cross was a later addition, and it now proposes the pupil Constantijn van Renesse as the painter. The Departure of the Shunammite Woman at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is linked to Ferdinand Bol, another pupil, and was painted around 1640.
