Rembrandt for $20 million

Sotheby’s auction house is a good indicator of the art market. In 2025, it broke records by selling for $236.4 million Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer Gustav Klimt and now all eyes are asked in another possible way: climbing to the bottom A young lion is restinga rare drawing by Rembrandt (Países Bajos, 1606-1669), estimated at $15 to $20 million.

The work belongs to Thomas Kaplan (New York, 1962) and his wife Daphne Recanati Kaplan, who founded The Leiden Collection, a foundation established in honor of Rembrandt’s birthplace, which today returns over 250 drawings and illustrations of the Dutch gold seal.

Sotheby’s hopes the work will sell for $15 million to $20 million on February 4 in New York, a dollar that I will join the Panthera organizationfunded by Kaplan in 2006 and dedicated to protecting the rescue of cats and their ecosystems.

The discussion follows the magazine Art newspaperdescribed by head of Departamento de Dibujos de Antiguos Maestros de Sotheby’s Gregory Rubenstein as “the best story about Rembrandt going to market in a long time”, both for its rarity – it is one of the artist’s few animal studies in private hands – and for the power of its image.

“It’s the first really significant work by Rembrandt to come to light under the age of 25, and it’s also a wonderful and powerful painting,” Rubinstein explained to EFE.

It is believed that the Dutch painter depicted the cat between the late 1730s and early 1640s and that he directly concealed it, conveying not only the animal’s shape but also its calmness.

The work, Rubinstein said, has the potential to attract both private collectors and institutions, from Rembrandt lovers to those wary of the lion portrait’s intensity.

The donation makes the discussion even more special, says Rubinstein, who says he’s “fascinated” to be able to help the NGO: “So we can use our work to help with this cause.”

Throughout history, the lion has embodied power, sovereignty and protection in cultures as diverse as Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome or China, but in the story, as Jeremy Irons pointed out in the Subastas House video, Rembrandt took this symbol and Show the animal a deeply dignified presence.

“It departs from the idea of ​​the lion as a simple symbol and dedicates it to its state when it is alive, observed in nature and depicted with great empathy,” says the British actor.

Only if they keep six drawings of Rembrandt’s signed lions y, between them, A young lion is resting he stands out as a “master of observation and empathy”, where the animal’s head is treated with extraordinary care and the eyes reveal not only anatomy but also life.

According to Kaplan, a great connoisseur of the painter’s work, “Rembrandt was clearly fascinated by lionsexotic creatures rarely met with in Europe at the time, and as in this discussion he was able to instill in them a greater and deeper inner life than most artists have been able to instill in the human soul”.

In this lion you do not know where Rembrandt came from, although you think he was in some Private collections of exotic animals that exist in the Low Countriesas small zoologists, nobles or merchants.

There he also observed an elephant, to which he dedicated various famous stories, whose movement across Europe is documented, unlike the history of this lion.

In addition to this study, the artist created only one more detailed study of animals – such as some and some of those from Paradise, now preserved in the Louvre and the British Museum – which emphasizes the rarity of the study described by Sotheby’s.

The current record of discussion of Rembrandt in this case is from 2000, when Bulwark De Rose and Windmill De Smeerpot, Amsterdam (c. 1649-1652) fetched $3.7 million at Christie’s New York, a figure that hoy paleness in the face of the results of the most prized debates of the ancient masters, dominated by the Renaissance works of Raphael or Miguel Ángel.

From February 4 to 6, Sotheby’s will sell twenty decades of paintings by the “Ancient European Masters”, from the final XIII. century to the beginning of the XIX century, including this Rembrandt, up for auction with those you hope for. earn more than 100 million dollars.

In parallel with the Rembrandt lion auction, Sotheby’s in New York will offer a Ecce Homo de Antonello da Messina, born in 1460 and worth between 10 and 15 thousand dollars.

In it, the painter shows Christ crowned with thorns and held by a cuerda on a cuella in a scene of suffering, while on the reverse appears Saint Jerome in the desert, scorned by symbols of devotion.

The same cycle of events included, among other things, el The mystical wedding of Santa Catalina de Alejandría Francisca de Zurbarán (est. $800,000 to $1.2 million), Allegory of the Five Emotions by Jan Lievens, Youthful Portrait of Biagio d’Antonio and main Judgment of 1415 banished by the Nazis to the Rothschild family and today counts between 5 and 7 thousand.