The once impressive list of paintings by Rembrandt in the Wallace Collection is down to one. But the London museum's director is happy with the loss. He ex-plained why to Andrew Graham-Dixon
JOHN INGAMELLS, director of the Wallace Collection, keeps losing Rembrandts. He lost three a cou-ple of years ago: one biblical painting, The Good Samaritan, and a pair of portraits, Jan Pellicorne with His Son Caspar and Susanna Pellicorne with Her Daughter. Naturally he was concerned, but there was little he could do about it. The problem has recurred. Yesterday he lost two more: The Artist in a Cap, listed in the Wallace Collection's catalogue as a self-portrait, and a Landscape with a Coach. To lose three Rembrandts looks like carelessness - but five?
However, famous Rembrandts in British public museums have disappeared in the past: most notori-ously, perhaps, the small portrait of Jacob de Gheyn in the Dulwich Art Gallery, which has been stolen on no fewer than three separate occasions (and, luckily, recovered each time, most recently when the picture was found abandoned on Munster railway station). But Mr Ingamells' disappearing Rembrandts never actually leave the museum. They are all still hanging in the Wallace Collection's august Manchester Square home in the West End of London, and Mr Ingamells says that he has not 'noticed any change in their appearance since they were lost'.
Five Dutch scholars calling themselves the Rembrandt Research Project are responsible for the dwin-dling of Mr Ingamells' stock of Rembrandts.
Since the late 1960s, the members of the RRP have examined virtually every known painting attributed to the Dutch master. In the middle of this decade, they began publishing their conclusions, in the form of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Two volumes have been published so far, in which the RRP considered every...
