Son of Rembrandt

Until last week the most expensive painting ever publicly auctioned was Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. The top bidder in 1961 was New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the price was $2,300,000.

Then last week another Rembrandt came up for auction, a painting of the artist's son Titus done between 1645 and 1648. Much smaller than the Met's Aristotle, it is a painting rich in charm, warm with sentiment. It shows an angelic child dressed in a grey-brown tunic and wearing a yellow cap topped with red and yellow plumes. Theatrical? Yes. But Rembrandt had reason for wanting to please the lad. His mother, Saskia, had died, and the servant girl Hendrickje Stoffels had only recently entered the house to care for him. To Rembrandt, his son Titus had become every bit a prince, and should be painted that way.

The Applause That Stopped. The painting experienced even more vicissitudes than Rembrandt, ending up, according to legend, over a bedstead in a Dutch farmhouse. There, in the early 1800s, a traveling British art restorer named George Barker saw and picked it up for one shilling, which also included the price of bed and breakfast. Barker presented it to his patron, Lord Spencer. In 1915 it passed into the hands of Sir Herbert Cook for $168,000. Last week it was up for auction in London's Christie's auction house, identified simply as Item 105.

In all, some 600 art dealers and fanciers (of whom Christie's calculated that at least 50 were serious bidders) showed up for the sale. Bidding started at $294,000, then leaped first by $1,500 bounds, then by $3,000, then by $30,000. It was a three-way race until Agnew's of London dropped out at $2,116,800, and from then on the bidding seesawed between Marlborough Fine Arts, Ltd., represented by David Somerset, who conspicuously signaled his bids with a large red pencil--and Norton Simon, the California industrialist and art collector (TIME, May 29, 1964). Finally the price leveled at $2,175,000. Four times Christie's auctioneer, I. O. Chance, repeated the bid; then he brought down his hammer, announced: "Sold to Marlborough Fine Arts." Applause scattered across the room for what seemed to be the Rem brandt's retention by the British. Then it abruptly stopped.

Three-Month Wait. Simon had sprung to his feet. "I have not finished bidding," he protested.

For a moment Auctioneer Chance was speechless. Then: "What did you say?"

"I said I hadn't finished bidding," said Simon. "You got my message. I am still bidding."

To prove it, Simon extricated from his U.S. passport a copy of his agreement with Christie's. He opened the paper, pointed to it and read: "When Mr. Simon is sitting down, he is bidding. If he bids openly, he is also bidding. When he stands up, he has stopped bidding. If he sits down again, he is not bidding unless he raises his finger. Having raised his finger, he is bidding, until he stands up again."

In 31 years of auctioning, Chance had never faced such confusion. However, Christie's catalogue for the sale clearly stated, "if any dispute arises between two or more Bidders, the Lot so in dispute shall be immediately put up again and re-sold." As bedlam took over, Chance declared: "I have no option but to reopen the bidding." In a matter of seconds, with Marlborough no longer interested, Rembrandt's Titus became Simon's. The price: $2,234,400, a bare $64,000 below the Met's

Aristotle, but by the square inch some six times as costly.*

In a jostling, impromptu sidewalk press conference afterward, Simon tried to clear the air. "I didn't want the publicity," he explained, saying that he had bid in the name of the Norton Simon Foundation. "I had discussed the ar rangement for bidding with Chance this morning, and we had signed an agreement," he insisted. He plans to hang the painting first in the soon-to-open Los Angeles County Museum, then offer it for viewing to other U.S. museums. But first Titus will have to tarry a bit; according to British law, a major art work must remain for three months to give the British government a chance to match the price, which in this case is most unlikely. Then it will be free to go, giving to untold millions public pleasure once valued privately at less than a shilling.

*$757 per sq. in. for Aristotle v. $4,448 for Titus.

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