AT LEAST 20 paintings long thought to be by Rembrandt were not painted by the great Dutch seven-teenth-century artist, according to an influential group of Dutch art historians.
The news is likely to send shock waves around the international art world, and wipe millions of pounds off the values of the paintings in question.
Some of the findings will be made public this afternoon at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, during a ceremony to mark the completion of Volume III of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, which has been com-piled by a respected committee of five academics whose collective title is the Rembrandt Research Project.
Full details of the paintings which the RRP has thrown out of the Rembrandt canon will not be available until January, when their book is published, but The Independent has obtained a list of the most controversial deattributions. These include several paintings in British ownership, notably two pictures belonging to the Duke of Westminster which have never previously been questioned, Portrait of the Painter Hendrick Martensz Sorgh and its pendant, a portrait of Sorgh's wife.
Other newly deattributed pictures in this country include the Wallace Collection's Self-Portrait circa 1634-6 and - the most sensational of the British casualties - the same museum's Landscape with a Coach, long considered to be one of Rembrandt's greatest masterpieces.
None of the major paintings affected has been declared a fake but the majority have been reattributed to some of the many pupils known to have been in Rembrandt's workshop in the 1630s.
The effect of an RRP deattribution on the market value of a painting is very great. Last year Sotheby's sold the Portrait of a Bearded Man Standing in a Doorway, once in the Thyssen Collection and long consid-ered a certain Rembrandt, and put a preliminary estimate of dollars...
