REMBRANDT BY THE NUMBERS
1830: English art dealer John Smith estimates the number of paintings by Rembrandt to be 614, a large number for a 17thc. artist, but plausible given the size of Rembrandt’s workshop.
1913: Dutch art historian and curator Cornelis De Groot puts the number of Rembrandt paintings up to 988. The improbable number is indicative of the high number of paintings erroneously or falsely attributed to the painter.
1914: American art historian John C. Van Dyck reduces De Groot’s number to just 48 autograph works.
1935: Dutch art historian and curator Abraham Bredius sets the Rembrandt canon at 639.
1968: Dutch art historian Horst Gerson publishes a revised version of Bredius’ catalogue raisonnée, reducing the number to 420.
2014: After 46 years of research into the corpus of works attributed to Rembrandt, the Rembrandt Research Project’s final volume accepts 348 paintings as authentic works from the master’s hand.
The work of no other old master has been studied more closely than that of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
The Frick Collection’s Polish Rider (c. 1655) was attributed to Rembrandt for centuries until a member of the RRP excluded it from the canon. The Frick maintained the attribution to Rembrandt. Scholarly opinion was initially adamantly opposed to the deattribution, but had finally come to agree with the the RRP’s verdict, when that group reversed its decision and adjudged the painting to be authentic in 2011.