A 1633 Rembrandt painting that is said to be the world’s most expensive per square inch—it’s less than 12 square inches in size—is one of the highlights of a new exhibit of work by Rembrandt, his tutor and his pupils at Amsterdam’s Hermitage Museum.
The small portrait of a bearded old man is one of 35 paintings on loan from a private collection of of 17th century Dutch art, and is on view in the Netherlands for the first time in decades. The owner, Thomas Kaplan, told Dutch News that he had pursued the painting for years.
‘Every year, most religiously, I would ask Sotheby’s to ask the owner whether he would sell. At a certain point, I asked someone else, who knew the owner…and the owner gave him a price, take it or leave it. I had a decision: to remember I paid apparently the highest price ever paid per square inch for a painting, or that I was the idiot who passed up on something I had been asking about for a decade and a half.’
The painting was formerly owned years ago by Andrew Mellon, who kept it when he gave the bulk of his collection to start the National Gallery in Washington. It’s being displayed in the special traveling box Mellon had built so it could accompany him on its travels.
The Hermitage Museum is located in a 17th-century building that served as a public old-age home until a few years ago. It became a museum, but with no collection of its own, in 2009, and was affiliated (and named for) the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which regularly supplied it with exhibitions. That tie was broken with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the museum has since become a site for special exhibitions.
