Портрет Дирка ван Оса

For decades this portrait sat in storage in Omaha, Nebraska, labelled not a Rembrandt but the work of his school, a follower or a student rather than the master. The sitter is Dirck van Os, a Dutch official tied to the great land-reclamation projects that were draining lakes into farmland in the northern Netherlands. Bought as a real Rembrandt in 1942, it was quietly downgraded, then largely forgotten. Only around 2010 did the Rembrandt scholar Ernst van de Wetering take a fresh look. The picture went to Amsterdam, and cleaning under the later overpaint revealed a hand that convinced him it was Rembrandt after all, painted late, about 1658. It hangs again under the artist's own name.