A Rembrandt painting discovered in a normal home in New Jersey and which then sold for $1.1 million made the headlines this week.
The sale itself happened in 2015.
But it’s only recently that the family at the centre of this extraordinary event have spoken about it publicly.
In an interview with Fox on the channel’s Strange Inheritance show, the Landau brothers explained how their grandparents had owned the painting for years.
It had been the focus of their dining room.
No one in the family was particularly keen on the painting, but they kept it in storage.
However, in 2015 the canvas was one of a number of lots the brothers consigned in the sale of their mother’s estate at Nye & Company in Bloomfield.
Experts were interested in the piece.
It seemed to resemble the descriptions of a work in Rembrandt’s long dispersed Five Senses series. But given that it wasn’t signed and there was no record of its sale, they convinced themselves it was a good copy.
That conviction lasted until the phones started ringing off the hook on the day of the auction.
It later transpired that the Landua’s grandfather had picked the painting up back in the 1920s. He didn’t know it was a Rembrandt, he just liked it.
Four of Rembrandt’s sense paintings have now been recovered.
Which means there’s one still out there.
Could it be in your attic?
