In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wanted to clear out American storage of works that had been seized in the postwar era. A 1967 act of Congress allowed for the picture’s return.
It was sent to Bonn, in West Germany, a U.S. ally in the Cold War. But because the work had been stolen from Weimar, which was then in communist East Germany, the government there lobbied for its return. An heir of Wilhelm Ernst, who had lent it to the museum in the first place, also made a claim. Ultimately, it went to her, and she sold it to Eller, the current owner, in 1983.
But the question remains: Is it a real Rembrandt? In the 1930s, the leading Rembrandt scholar of the era, Abraham Bredius, described “Rembrandt in a Red Beret” in a catalog of the painter’s works as “Self-portrait, 1643,” and noted it as stolen. But in the 1960s, opinions shifted. The art historian Horst Gerson updated Bredius’s Rembrandt catalog in 1969, listing the red beret picture as “a portrait by, or after, Bol,” referring to Rembrandt’s pupil.
The following year, experts from the Rembrandt Research Project, a group of Dutch scholars who examined all the master’s known paintings, were even more dubious: They suggested that it was a 19th-century imitation. Ernst van de Wetering, an art historian who later led the research group, re-examined the painting at the Rijksmuseum, and came to a different conclusion, published in 2005: that it was produced by Rembrandt’s studio, a workshop overseen by the painter that often sold works as “Rembrandts,” even if they were completed, or entirely painted, by his pupils.
Jeroen Giltaij, the former chief curator of old master paintings at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, recently published a new catalog of all known and disputed Rembrandts, “The Great Rembrandt Book: All 648 Paintings.” He listed “Rembrandt in a Red Beret” as a studio work, as well.
He said he had gone to see the painting in The Hague two weeks ago. “But I could not attribute it to Rembrandt, on the basis of stylistic reasons,” he wrote in an email.
