Rediscovered Rembrandt valued at €15,000 now offered for £15mn

Sotheby’s will offer a rediscovered Rembrandt night scene for £10mn-£15mn as a highlight of its Old Masters sale in London this December. The small, nearly monochromatic work — “The Adoration of the Kings” (now dated c1628) — was catalogued as Circle of Rembrandt at Christie’s in Amsterdam in 2021 and estimated at €10,000-€15,000. Others thought it might be the real thing, helping the work then sell for €860,000 (including fees).

Its buyer subsequently contacted Sotheby’s and the auction house has spent 18 months researching the work, including detailed infrared imaging. The conclusion is that it is “not just by Rembrandt, but is a really significant Rembrandt”, says George Gordon, Sotheby’s co-chair of Old Master paintings and drawings. Leading scholars, including Volker Manuth, who co-wrote the 2019 catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s paintings, support the auction house’s views.

The research has revealed changes that Rembrandt made while painting, including moving the protagonists’ heads towards the holy family, to create a more pronounced focal point. “We can see how his mind was working,” Gordon says. He also highlights the artist’s command of reflected light from two sources — a warm, interior one and the cooler Star of Bethlehem.

Known as a Rembrandt until the 1950s, the work “completely disappeared” from records in the intervening decades, most likely because the only available photograph did not do it justice, Gordon says. It comes to auction on December 6 and has a third-party guarantee.

Deutsche Bank has revealed details of the art projects for its new UK headquarters at 21 Moorfields in the City of London, opening next March. As well as showing about 1,200 works from its collection (which numbers about 50,000 globally), the bank has commissioned wall-works by three emerging British artists — Simeon Barclay, Rene Matić and Claire Hooper — all of whom responded to a theme of inclusivity. Matić, for example, will produce 20 large-scale photographs for display across three floors, from their flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do series. This explores the complicated notion of Britishness through the daily life of urban communities.

Many of the works in the new building were bought at the Frieze fairs, which the bank has sponsored since the second London edition in 2004. These include a set of works by Noémie Goudal, bought last year, to hang in the reception area, and works by Lubaina Himid, bought in 2016 (the year before Himid won the Turner prize), to go in a conference room named after the artist. “Our longstanding partnership with Frieze illustrates our mutual passion to create access to support fresh ideas,” says Britta Färber, global head of art and culture at Deutsche Bank.

Phillips has won the mandate to sell 30 works from the prestigious Triton Collection Foundation, valued at more than $70mn and with an auction house-backed guarantee of sale. The works, collected by the late Rotterdam shipping magnate Willem Cordia and his wife, Marijke Cordia-van der Laan, span the 19th century — such as Edgar Degas’s “Le petit déjeuner après le bain” (c1894, est $2.5mn-$3.5mn) — to postwar and beyond, including Joan Mitchell’s “Untitled” (c1954, est $7mn-$10mn). Fernand Léger’s celebratory “Le 14 juillet” (1912-13) has a $15mn-$20mn estimate and comes as a two-for-one work: conservators at the Triton Collection Foundation recently uncovered an earlier painting by the artist on the back of the canvas.

The Triton Collection — named after the Greek god of the sea, alluding to the family’s maritime business — focuses on the avant-garde, so is by its nature evolving, notes Phillips Americas president Jean-Paul Engelen. Plus, he says, “the founders always wanted their children to have their own experience of collecting”. Phillips’ dedicated auction will be in New York on November 14.

Anat Ebgi, a gallerist with three spaces in Los Angeles, is opening in New York. The move to a historic block in Tribeca will be “amazing for many of our artists, who have not had a show in New York”, Ebgi says. Her gallery will have two floors and a mezzanine level across about 5,000 sq ft — bigger than any of her spaces in LA. “Unlike most people, I went to New York and found more square footage,” she says. Her neighbours in the increasingly popular gallery area will include PPOW and Andrew Kreps, while the midtown Marian Goodman Gallery moves its New York base nearby, to 385 Broadway, next year.

Ebgi plans a soft opening on November 2, to coincide with the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual fair. This show will include work by the Polish artist Krzysztof Strzelecki, who is recreating a gym in ceramics, says Stefano di Paola, the gallery partner who is overseeing the New York opening. Anat Ebgi will then formally open with a group show in January followed by a solo show of the LA artist Greg Ito.

Atlanta gets its first art fair next year, a collaboration between Art Market Productions (AMP) and Intersect Art and Design. Both businesses already (separately) run regional fairs in the US, including in Seattle, Palm Springs and San Francisco. Kelly Freeman, director at AMP, says that Atlanta “is experiencing an incredible artistic moment that not everybody knows about”. She says that while there are already some “great events” that cater to the American south — namely Art Basel in Miami Beach and the Dallas Art Fair — “these are more about the travelling global arts community. Our shows are more about the places we are in.”

Other businesses are responding to Georgia’s growing cultural community, notably in film and television production. In March, the Hollywood talent agency UTA opened an office and gallery in Atlanta and last year Atlanta Art Week launched, a citywide event for contemporary art whose second edition runs this week (until October 8). The new Atlanta Art Fair will have approximately 50 exhibitors and is slated to coincide with the art week in October 2024. It will be in Kirkwood’s Pullman Yards, a former industrial area that has reinvented itself as a cultural hub.

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