‘Two African Men’ 17th century copy of Rembrandt, in focus

“Two African Men” a copy of Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting by an unknown author dating from the 17th century, temporarily exhibited at the National Art Museum of Romania, is an oil on canvas that was in storage until November last year and will return there at the end of February.

The work comes from the Pinacoteca Statului (today’s Museum of the Municipality of Bucharest), but it is not known how it got there. It was probably donated or acquired in the interwar period. It was then given to MNAR, at that time the Art Museum of the Republic, and has a 19th-century inscription on the back stating that it is a copy after Rembrandt.

Although in need of restoration, it will take a long time for it to be restored, as explained by Mălina Conțu, historian and theorist of art and architecture, PhD in Visual Arts at UNArte Bucharest, head of the European Art section at MNAR and associate lecturer at the Department of Art History at the University of Bucharest. There are hundreds of works of art in need of conservation work, it is not certain whether this painting would require half a year or two years, and only six specialists are dealing with them.

The museum specialist presented the work as part of “Works in Focus”, a program taking place in the European Art Gallery. Along with this, several lectures were also given by Mălina Conțu on the theme “The Image of the Colored Character”.

The original, the most important representation of African portraits

The ‘Two African Men’ copy, most recently exhibited in 2018, is by an anonymous Dutch artist after a double portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn in the second half of the 17th century.

Rembrandt’s work, dated 1661, is in the Mauritshuis Museum in Hague and is considered the most important depiction of African characters. The two figures, who are presumed to be brothers, are spontaneously captured, with similar but not identical features, which was a novelty at the time in the work of artists who had until then usually depicted similarly colored characters and generally in religious paintings.

The painting in Bucharest has dimensions of 83.9×59.2cm, being larger than Rembrandt’s sketch, it is most probably made by one of his pupils, it shows differences in expression and in the costume of the character in the foreground, but “the natural, realistic character of the expressions and features is preserved”, as Conțu explains.

Through this series of presentations, launched in 2016, MNAR invites the public to enter into a direct dialog with lesser-known or even unknown works from the European Art Section. For four months, a painting or a sculpture is exhibited in the European Art Gallery with a view to valorizing it from the perspective of various themes designed to put it in a different light.

Photo credit: curatorial.ro