Restoration of an early Rembrandt painting has revealed what could be a Muslim figure that had been hidden for centuries beneath additions made after the artist left the work unfinished.
The figure appears in Let The Little Children Come Unto Me, a biblical scene painted around 1627, when Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was still a young artist in the Dutch city of Leiden. Conservation work has shown that a central man in the scene had originally been painted wearing a turban, before another artist later changed the headwear into a Dutch cap.
Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon believes the restored figure is particularly significant because of where and when the painting was made. Leiden, in the western Netherlands, was receiving refugees from the Thirty Years’ War, while religious conflict was reshaping Europe. In that context, he reads the work as a young Rembrandt imagining a scene of welcome for children, strangers and people of different faiths.
The painting also has its own story of recovery. When it appeared at Lempertz auction house in Cologne in 2014, it was catalogued as Netherlandish School, mid-17th century, and sold for €1.5 million (Dh6.3 million). Sotheby’s is now presenting it as one of the most significant early works by Rembrandt still in private hands, with an estimate of £8 million to £12 million (Dh38.8 million to Dh58.2 million).
Alex Bell, chairman emeritus of Sotheby’s UK and Old Masters Worldwide, says the restoration has brought Rembrandt’s original design back into view.
“This restoration has fundamentally transformed our understanding of the painting,” Bell says. “Not only does it provide a remarkable insight in to Rembrandt’s creative process – from the earliest stages of composition to areas worked up to a highly finished state – but it also recovers important details that had been obscured for centuries.
“The re-emergence of the turbaned figure at the centre of the composition reveals a work that was originally far more ambitious, complex and unexpected than the later overpainted version.”
The painting’s unfinished state is part of what makes it valuable to scholars. Some figures are close to complete, while others remain looser, preserving the way Rembrandt built a large religious scene before another artist changed it.
“We don’t know a huge amount about why the painting was conceived,” Graham-Dixon tells The National. “It’s probably the only painting in the world of its kind, because Rembrandt took it, as it were, three quarters to completion, and then stopped.”
At the time, Rembrandt was trying to establish himself in Leiden as a painter and engraver of religious subjects. The painting was never completed or delivered and its first owner is unknown. Even so, Graham-Dixon believes it preserves something of the city around him.
“It gives us a snapshot of the concerns of people in Leiden, where he was as a young man at this particular moment in history,” he says.
The Thirty Years’ War had broken out in 1618, while the Dutch Eighty Years’ War had resumed after a long truce with Spain. Much of the Dutch conflict was fought away from major civilian centres, but the violence across Europe was still reshaping life in the Dutch Republic. Leiden was taking in people from German territories devastated by the war, many of them Protestants.
“I think this picture is above all a response to the general sense of political and military crisis that engulfed people at this time,” Graham-Dixon says. “There was a general feeling that enough is enough when it comes to all this religious warfare, Protestant against Catholic, Protestant against Protestant, and so on.”
The subject comes from the New Testament episode in which children are brought to Jesus and his disciples try to turn them away. Jesus rebukes the disciples and welcomes the children instead. Rembrandt’s version makes the moment crowded and unsettled, with adults pressing in from the sides and background.
“When I look at this picture, that’s what I see,” Graham-Dixon says. “I see a young Rembrandt who’s thinking peace – thinking: let’s hope for a better world, where children are taken care of.”
The later artist also overpainted a nude child with clothing and parts of the crowd were made more conventional. Graham-Dixon says the intervention appears to have happened after the unfinished painting had been untouched for years.
The additions obscured the picture so much, he says, that “it took quite some seeing to realise that it was a Rembrandt”.
One clue remained near the top right of the painting. A small figure looking over the crowd had not been obscured by the later overpaint, and Graham-Dixon identifies him as Rembrandt himself.
“It’s a wonderful little self-portrait of Rembrandt as a young man peering over the crowd,” he says. “There he is, unmistakably Rembrandt.”
Other figures may also have come from Rembrandt’s family circle. Graham-Dixon believes his mother appears near the turbaned figure, while his father may be the silhouetted figure at the back. If correct, the painting would be not only an early religious work but one of Rembrandt’s most personal group scenes.
The possible Muslim figure sits at the centre of Graham-Dixon’s argument, though he does not state the interpretation as fact. Turbans and eastern dress were common in biblical art of the period, because artists understood that the events they were painting had not taken place in northern Europe. Rembrandt himself sometimes used such clothing in his own images.
In this painting, Graham-Dixon believes the turbaned man should be understood as part of a wider crowd gathered around Jesus and the children. The group, in his view, includes different religious and cultural types brought into the same space.
“I wouldn’t like to say that it’s definitely a Muslim,” he says. “But I do think there’s quite a strong feeling in the picture that the different people represent different strands of humanity.
“We’re meant to see the type of a Jewish person, and perhaps the type of a Muslim person. We’re very much meant to see Christ succouring children. And children, to the dissenting Dutch imagination, are a symbol of the common humanity that we all share, because they haven’t decided what they’re going to believe in.”
That idea had roots in Leiden’s religious culture. Graham-Dixon cites the legacy of Jacobus Arminius, the Leiden theologian whose followers were associated with the Remonstrant movement. In a 1606 speech at Leiden University, Arminius condemned the persecution of Jews and Muslims as well as violence between Christian groups.
Rembrandt later painted Johannes Wtenbogaert, a leading Remonstrant minister. Graham-Dixon also connects the artist to Mennonite circles associated with pacifism. In the Dutch Republic, he says, Mennonites could avoid combat and instead take supporting roles during war.
The movement of refugees into Leiden gives the crowd another possible layer. Graham-Dixon says the city was taking in thousands of people during the years Rembrandt was working on the picture, and he sees that pressure in the figures pushing towards Jesus.
He estimates that Leiden accepted as many as 10,000 refugees in a single year, around the time Rembrandt was working on the painting.
“When you look at this picture, I can’t help thinking he’s representing something that’s going on in his time,” Graham-Dixon says.
The children depicted are significant because of the harsher Calvinist ideas that shaped parts of Dutch religious life in the period, particularly around predestination and the fate of children who died in infancy. Where some ministers could offer grieving parents little comfort, Graham-Dixon sees Rembrandt’s painting as insisting on blessing and protection.
“Rembrandt, in a picture like this, is clearly siding against the Calvinist view,” he says. “This is a painting saying: blessed are the children.”
Those debates are still relevant, Graham-Dixon notes. “Look around the world today,” he says. “There are places where children are still being bombed to death.”
The painting will return to the market with a very different history from the one it carried in 2014, when it was sold as the work of an unknown Netherlandish artist. Its restoration has not only returned it to Rembrandt, but uncovered a less orderly and more searching work than the later version allowed viewers to see.
Graham-Dixon sees the crowd as central to the painting’s force: children, families, strangers and figures from different worlds moving towards a place of shelter. He places it within a Dutch culture marked by war and looking for “places of safe shelter and safe haven”.
Rembrandt left the painting unfinished, and the restored figure may never be identified with certainty. But the work now reads less like a conventional biblical scene than a call for broader tolerance. Its sense of unity is fragile rather than settled, which may be why the painting feels newly legible nearly four centuries after it was made.
