Today is Rembrandt’s 400th birthday, though he hardly looks a day over 23. Rembrandt was well known in his time, though he lived beyond his means and declared bankruptcy 350 years ago. In the end, he was forced to sell everything, save some paint, a brush and canvas. Although he died poor, it’s unlikely that any private collector who owns his paintings today will. In December, 2000 his Portrait of a Lady fetched a cool $28.7 million.
During his lifetime, Rembrandt was prolific, producing more than 600 paintings. He took on so many apprentices, that art collectors are still trying to disambiguate the provenance of some works.
So where are his paintings now? A survey of 176 paintings finds that 80% of them remain in Europe. Most of the others are in the United States. German museums housed a quarter of the Rembrandts in the survey, 47 paintings in all. Over the past 400 years, 85% of Rembrandt’s paintings have left his native Netherlands, but the Dutch still have the distinction of owning the most Rembrandts per capita.
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This entry was posted by Statastico on Saturday, July 15th, 2006, at 7:55 pm, and was filed in Economics, Art.
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