From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   A ‘Sleeper’ Discovered at Auction Tells a Very Dutch Tale   
   By Nina Siegal, June 15, 2022, NY Times   
      
   AMSTERDAM — In art world parlance, you’d call the drawing a “sleeper.”   
   A small auction house in Massachusetts offered it for sale as a “an   
   unidentified gentleman, initialed I.L., and dated 1652,” with an estimate of   
   $200 to $300. Within about    
   10 minutes, it sold for half a million dollars.   
      
   The New York dealer who bought the piece, Christopher Bishop, is now bringing   
   it to what is one of the world’s top art fairs, TEFAF Maastricht, where it   
   will be featured on the shortlist of fair highlights, with an asking price of   
   1.35 million euros (   
   about $1.44 million).   
      
   How did it go from being a little bit of nothing to a great big deal? History,   
   you could say.   
      
   The story begins at the turn of the 17th century, when a 9-year-old Dutch boy   
   named Maerten Tromp went to sea with his father, a naval officer. Three years   
   later, English pirates murdered his father, but Maerten joined the Dutch Navy   
   in 1637 and rose    
   through the ranks to become commander of the Dutch fleet.   
      
   He was a determined combatant, and frequently victorious. After great success   
   through the First Anglo-Dutch War, he sat for a formal portrait by a Dutch   
   master, Jan Lievens, in Amsterdam. A year later, in 1653, he was killed by an   
   English sharpshooter    
   during a battle, entombed in a marble monument and celebrated as a Dutch   
   national hero.   
      
   The original Lievens drawing was pinned to an engraving plate (upside down)   
   and turned into a print, reproduced dozens of times. Lievens later made a new   
   drawing based on the first, with Tromp appearing a little wizened; this second   
   drawing is now in the    
   collection of the British Museum in London.   
      
   He also used the original drawing as the basis of two oil paintings of Tromp,   
   one of which is now in the Rijksmuseum’s collection and the other in private   
   hands.   
      
   In 1943, this image of Tromp again became a template for a postage stamp   
   featuring Tromp, a kind of nationalist gesture by the Dutch government in the   
   middle of World War II.   
      
   The original drawing was traded among private collectors. It was last   
   inventoried among the possessions of the English collector William Mayor, who   
   died in 1874, and last seen in public at an auction of the estate of Robert P.   
   Roupell in Frankfurt in    
   1888. Then it disappeared from public view for 132 years.   
      
   In 2020, Mr. Bishop was working remotely during the coronavirus pandemic,   
   scanning online auction catalogs for finds. An image of a drawing at the small   
   Marion Antique Auction house, on the Massachusetts mainland near Cape Cod,   
   caught his eye. Although    
   it was purportedly signed “I.L.,” Bishop realized that the monogram could   
   be “J.L.” because “J” in the 17th century was often written “I.”   
      
   “I put it in the back of my mind, and then I pondered for a couple of   
   hours,” he said. “It just occurred to me, why couldn’t it be Jan   
   Lievens? Then I did some research online and saw the print. I thought could   
   this be the original from which the    
   printmaker made the engraving.”   
      
   A few days later, Mr. Bishop was able to find the record of Mayor’s   
   collection, which told him that the dimensions matched the Marion’s drawing,   
   and that the monogram was written under Tromp’s arm. He booked a viewing and   
   drove up to Massachusetts;    
   because he couldn’t go inside, the auction house owner brought it outside so   
   that he could look at it on the porch.   
      
   “I knew it was a real drawing, and I had a very positive feeling,” he   
   said. “I was trying very hard not to telegraph to them how optimistic I was   
   about it.”   
      
   Frank McNamee, co-owner of Marion auctions, said it had come from a family   
   that was looking to auction off quite a bit of hand-painted porcelain. He   
   visited their house and was invited into a room of framed prints. The owner   
   told him, he said in a phone    
   interview, “Just pick whatever you think might have value.” Mr. McNamee   
   saw the portrait and was intrigued. “I actually thought it was a fake   
   Rembrandt,” he said.   
      
   “There wasn’t enough time to really spend on researching it, but I made   
   sure it got featured in all the auction advertisements,” Mr. McNamee added.   
   He said they estimated it at only a few hundred dollars, “assuming that we   
   might not be right.”   
      
   By the time of the sale on Oct. 10, 2020, it was clear that the drawing had   
   already garnered a lot of curiosity. More than 15 potential bidders had called   
   about it before the sale, and although there were only half a dozen people   
   inside the auction room    
   because of Covid, at least five people placed bids over the phone. Lots of   
   people had the same idea that Mr. Bishop did. They thought it might be the   
   long-lost Lievens.   
      
   When the auctioneer, Dave Glynn, reached $200,000 he paused. “It looks like   
   we underestimated this one,” he said, before continuing.   
      
   After about $300,000, Mr. McNamee said, only two bidders remained. They drove   
   the price up to $514,800, which was where the hammer fell. Even at that point,   
   Mr. Bishop wasn’t entirely sure the drawing was a Lievens.   
      
   “It had numerous condition issues,” Mr. McNamee explained. “It was   
   damaged and it was laid down, or glued onto a backing, and that causes issues   
   with acid, burning into the work. From what I remember, that was an issue with   
   that, as well as some    
   paper loss to the piece, but not in the image.”   
      
   Mr. Bishop took it back to New York. A restorer removed it from its backing to   
   discover that the paper on which the drawing had been made had a watermark —   
   an identifying pattern that indicated its 17th-century maker. It was a   
   particularly unique paper    
   supplier that both Lievens and Rembrandt had used in Amsterdam in the 1650s   
   — a telltale sign of its authenticity.   
      
   When Bishop compared it with one of the prints made from the subsequent   
   engraving, a lot of other elements aligned: the pinpricks where the drawing   
   would have been attached to the plate, the certain folds and tracings, and   
   even ink blotches left on the    
   paper.   
      
      
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