Who Done It? The Rembrandt Research Project
In the 1980s a massive challenge arose to all the previous scholarship on The Polish Rider. The Rembrandt Research Project, an informal committee at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, had started in 1968 to investigate the master's entire corpus, which they believed had been greatly inflated over the years by false attributions, to see what was actually produced by Rembrandt himself as opposed to his students and imitators.
The team, which was headed by Josua Bruyn of Amsterdam University, and included such eminent Rembrandt scholars as Bob Haak and Ernst van de Wetering, analysed the paintings using iconographic and technical methods, including autoradiography (analysis of brush strokes). At least two members of the team viewed each considered work in person, and the aim was to divide the wuvre into three categories: authentic Rembrandts, disputable works, and rejections.In the 1980s, after many years of effort, the team rejected a great many canvases, including the famous Man in a Golden Helmet (Gemaldegalerie, Berlin), almost universally thought genuine and one of Rembrandt's greatest works. The prestigious Wallace Collection in London saw its twelve Rembrandts reduced to only one, although it had questions. Then in 1984, in a brief review of a book by Werner Sumowski on Rembrandt's school, Josua Bruyn, for the first time since von Wurzbach in 1906, questioned the authorship of The Polish Rider and cautiously proposed the master's student, Willem Drost.39
Other members of the Project expressed doubts about who painted the work but did not necessarily gravitate towards Drost. For example, to Zygulski, Bruyn pointed out the soft outline of the rider's figure, which he thought unlike Rembrandt and indicating a female artistic temperament. Haak criticized disproportions in the rider's figure, the strangeness of the horse, the nondescript background, and the lack of brush strokes typical of Rembrandt.
For van de Wetering, the horseman lacked the usual “corporeality” and “stability” of Rembrandt's human figures and seemed too insubstantial and vibrating in the unreal gleam; he noted too the loose association between background and rider, again untypical of the master. These volleys re-opened the entire question of who created the painting, letting the much-feared authorship genie out of the bottle.40In general, however, Bruyn's tentative but unexplained attribution to Drost, to say nothing of the private concerns of other team members, dis- combobulated the art world. The Frick Collection refused to change its attribution to Rembrandt; Held was indignant and in an interview even referred to the Rembrandt Research Project as “the Amsterdam mafia,” and Anthony Bailey wrote Responses to Rembrandt (1994) pointing out the weaknesses in the team's arguments and anaysing its qualifications and methods, finding its documentation inadequate, its reliance on modern technology too rigid, and its judgments overly severe. He even quoted a limerick from the 1920s:
When the Rembrandt came to the cleaner
It began to look meaner and meaner.
Said Rembrandt van Rijn,
I doubt it is mine,
Ask Bode or else Valentiner.41
New York artist Russell Connor painted a canvas purporting to show Rembrandt creating his controversial picture and called it Hands off the ‘Polish Rider!4
This growing chorus of protest to the Project revisionists coincided with the retirement of Bruyn and several other of the team's members in 1993 and its public declaration that its methods, especially its “over-rigorous classification of the paintings into categories,” would be changed.43 A younger scholar, Ernst van de Wetering, took over both Bruyn's chair at Amsterdam University and chairmanship of the Project and soon expressed an opinion on The Polish Rider quite at variance with that of Bruyn: the painting was indeed by Rembrandt, but with certain parts completed later, possibly by one of his students.
The faces of rider and horse seem to have been by the master, but the shank of the man's boot, the folded-back tail of his coat, and possibly his hose by that other hand.44 A few years later, Jonathan Bikker published the first scholarly synthesis on Willem Drost and stated categorically that no arguments had been made supporting Drost's authorship of the canvas and he saw no reason for attributing it to him.45 Robert Hughes, in the New York Review of Books, summed up Anglo-American opinion on the matter:There can be few paintings of comparable quality of which less is known for sure than the “Polish Rider.” But the doubts cast on it by the Rembrandt Research Project are also guesswork. The efforts to reattribute it to one of Rembrandt's pupils, Willem Drost, about whose life and work very little is known, are quite inconclusive. They are like attempts to “prove” that Hamlet was really written by someone other than William Shakespeare - but someone who was still as good a writer as Shakespeare, for whose existence there is no actual evidence. Until such a phantom turns up, to imagine Rembrandt without the “Polish Rider” is rather like trying to imagine Wagner without Parsifal.46
Could the entire question have been stated any more clearly?