Rembrandt From Private Collection To Be Sold at Christie's

A Rembrandt portrait that has been hidden in a private collection and not seen by the public for nearly 40 years will be sold at Christie's in London on December 8, reported The New York Times on September 18. "Portrait of a Man, Half-Length, With His Arms Akimbo," from 1658, depicts an unknown sitter, and experts at Christie's say it could garner $29.7 million to $41.2 million, the highest estimate ever for an old master painting coming to auction.

Although Christie's will say only that the painting is from a "distinguished private collection," the seller is known to be Barbara Piasecka Johnson, a Polish-born collector who once lived in Princeton, N.J., and now resides in Assisi, Italy. Johnson inherited about $300 million from her husband, J. Seward Johnson, son of the founder of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, after he died in 1983.

The portrait was first shown publicly in 1847, when it was included in an exhibition at the British Institution in London, on loan from George Folliott, a notable British collector. His grandson sold it in 1930 at Sotheby's, where it brought £18,500, then a huge price. Soon after that it was acquired by George Huntington Hartford II, a supermarket heir who was in his 20s at the time. He donated it to Columbia University in 1958, and it hung in the president's office until 1968, when, because of student demonstrations, it was removed for safekeeping and put in storage.

In 1970 Columbia lent it to "Rembrandt After 300 Years," an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. That was the last time it was seen in public. Four years later Harold Diamond, a New York dealer, sold it to the Johnsons on behalf of the university, which used the proceeds to benefit an endowment fund.