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A tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man (c 1630) which was bequeathed to it in 1951 as a Rembrandt panel. In 1981, it was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist that effectively has a final say on attributions.
“They saw it in the flesh and decided it wasn’t a Rembrandt painting,” said the Ashmolean’s curator of northern European art, An Van Camp. “They said it might be an imitator painting in the style of Rembrandt and is possibly made before the end of the 17th century, so not even in Rembrandt’s lifetime.”
Dispirited curators moved it to the museum’s stores in the basement. Van Camp joined the museum in 2015 and became aware of the postcard-sized painting that “no one wanted to talk about because it was this fake Rembrandt”.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/30/fake-rembrandt-came-from-artists-workshop-and-is-possibly-genuine-ashmolean-oxford 
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man (c 1630) which was bequeathed to it in 1951 as a Rembrandt panel. In 1981, it was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist that effectively has a final say on attributions.
“They saw it in the flesh and decided it wasn’t a Rembrandt painting,” said the Ashmolean’s curator of northern European art, An Van Camp. “They said it might be an imitator painting in the style of Rembrandt and is possibly made before the end of the 17th century, so not even in Rembrandt’s lifetime.”
Dispirited curators moved it to the museum’s stores in the basement. Van Camp joined the museum in 2015 and became aware of the postcard-sized painting that “no one wanted to talk about because it was this fake Rembrandt”.
