Two rare Rembrandt paintings that have remained unknown to art scholars for over 200 years were unearthed from a private art collection of a British family and were never displayed publicly, according to media reports.
During a regular valuation, specialists at Christie's auction house stumbled upon the paintings created by the 17th-century Dutch master.
“I wasn’t aware of what I was going to be seeing. I dared to dream. But it was extraordinary to me that the pictures had never been studied before. They were completely absent from the Rembrandt literature,” Henry Pettifer said, international deputy chair of Old Master paintings at Christie’s, said as quoted by media.
The portraits of Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife Jaapgen Carels, painted by Rembrandt, will be up for sale at Christie's showrooms in London on July 6. The portraits were bought by the ancestors of the family in 1824 and have an estimated value of $6mln - $10mln for the pair of artworks.
Christie's did not disclose the identity of the family who owned the portraits.