Discredited Painting Hanging in Private Residence for Decades Authenticated as Rembrandt
22March 3, 2026
A painting that has gone unseen by the public since being deauthenticated more than fifty years ago has been determined to be an early work byRembrandt van Rijnand will go on view at theRijksmuseumin Amsterdam this week alongside twenty-five others by the renowned artist.
TitledVision of Zacharias in the Temple, the biblical 1633 canvas depicts the elderly high priest Zacharias being told by the Archangel Gabriel that he and his wife will have a son despite their advanced age. It was excluded from the Dutch master’s oeuvre in 1960 and instead attributed to his workshop, which employed painters including Jan Lievens and Salomon Koninck. The discredited painting was purchased by a private collector in 1961 and displayed in his home for decades. Following his death, his children, who wondered whether it might not be a realRembrandt, owing to the artist’s large signature, brought the work to theRijksmuseum.
Researchers at the institution spent two years investigating the canvas, matching the signature and the pigments on the canvas to those of other works by Rembrandt, and subjecting the work to macro-XRF scans revealing compositional changes. They concluded that the painting was in fact authentic, made when Rembrandt was just twenty-seven and predating the Dutch artist’s 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, held in the Rijksmuseum’s collection, by nine years. The authentication lifts the canvas’s worth from thousands to millions of dollars.
Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbets told The Guardian that the work was “very dark” when it arrived to the institution. “But when it had been restored, I came in to see it and it really looked like the gold was bursting off it—which, of course, is remarkable because he painted with yellow and not with gold. This is what makes the artist a true artist,” he affirmed. “It is classic Rembrandt.”