Schorer was patient. He knew time was often on the side of the tenacious sleuth. Moreover, he had another case he was running down about another Dutch painter. This one was named Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.
In the fall of 2021, Schorer acquired one of the deepest sleepers he’d ever seen: a circa 1629 portrait of an elderly gin-nosed man, seemingly by Rembrandt. It had been put up for auction in Maryland as an “imitation in the manner of.” The estimated sale price: $1,000–$1,500. After a bidding war, Schorer won it for a healthy $288,000. If real, that would be a fraction of its value. (Rembrandts rarely come to market, but a pair of plausibly authentic portraits sold for $14.2 million in 2023, and 18 months earlier, the Dutch government, in association with the Rembrandt Association and the Rijksmuseum, had paid a whopping $198 million for a bona fide self-portrait.)
Art authentication efforts move slowly; broadly accepted conclusions can remain evasive. And so, while more time is needed to determine whether Schorer had found an actual Rembrandt, he and whoever he outbid weren’t alone in considering it genuine. Volker Manuth, the lead author of the artist’s 2019 catalogue raisonné, wouldn’t offer a categorical answer but, as he told me, “It is very likely that it has been painted by Rembrandt.”
That same conclusion was reached by Manuth’s esteemed predecessor, Abraham Bredius, whose landmark 1935 survey of Rembrandt’s complete paintings included the portrait as Study of a Man With a Swollen Nose. Regardless, Schorer’s putative Rembrandt hadn’t been heard of since World War II. And yet, unlike many paintings looted by the Nazis, this one, with proper papers in tow, had been smuggled to the US from Europe as the war broke out. The portrait was then sold, legally, to the chairman of Velcro Companies. In short: Its provenance appeared spotless.
The painting fell into dormancy after being donated to a Benedictine monastery in California. In the intervening decades, it nearly went up in flames in two separate forest fires. When rescued from the first blaze, one monk asked the other, who’d snatched it off the wall at the last second: “Why did you take that?” The brothers dismissed the idea of it being an honest-to-God Rembrandt as laughable, so they finally ended up consigning it to an auction house. (The monks had appraisers weigh in, only to be told the work couldn’t possibly have been by the master.)
After his winning bid, Schorer brought a high-end 3D reproduction of the painting to the monastery as a donation. The surviving monks there were still in a state of semi-shock over the fact that they’d unwittingly owned such a pricey work.
Schorer told them he’d found an eyelash in the impasto and was testing to see if its DNA matched Rembrandt’s. (He was not, however, aware of any genetic databases he could check it against.) Either way, probing into it seemed to matter more to him than solving the problem. Working with Old Masters gets philosophical at times; attaining a clear resolution isn’t always possible. In art, some questions can’t be answered—as Schorer says, using a musical metaphor, they simply “hang out there in the ether as a chord unresolved.” He doesn’t tend to dwell on such perplexities; he just moves on to the next case. “Investigating the unseen in the twilight hour is how I enjoy spending my life,” he explains. After dinner at the monastery, he confided to me that he had come to a realization: His pursuit, in effect, was a never-ending quest for some kind of religious illumination that he knew might never come.
The hunt for the lost Avercamp continued into Masters Week and Master Drawings New York in January 2023—auctions and gallery shows featuring old works. (More on the Avercamp saga shortly.) At that point, Schorer unveiled his Rembrandt at an invitation-only cocktail reception on the Upper East Side. Elegant guests streamed in, some wearing oversized scarves, others with glittering cuff links. Mayfair accents could be heard over voices speaking German or Dutch. Schorer, sporting a royal blue suit with matching sneakers, winkingly and self-deprecatingly introduced himself to new arrivals as a research assistant.
For the occasion, he’d hung his recently acquired 1629 portrait next to a self-portrait made around the same time by Rembrandt’s dashing friend and competitor, Jan Lievens. (Their early works can be almost impossible to tell apart.) The Lievens was on loan from Theodore Roosevelt’s descendants. Schorer had been at a wedding in their home when he recognized Lievens’s face on the wall. “I found it in the foyer,” he told me. “I went around asking, ‘Who is the proprietor?’ The last time it was mentioned was decades ago. I don’t think it has ever been on public view.”
At the reception, a professorial man in a bow tie took in the display, rapt. “I’m having a moment,” he gasped. “This Lievens hasn’t been seen in over a century, and Cliff found it at someone’s house.” He was Lloyd DeWitt, a coauthor of Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered and at the time chief curator at Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art.
The Lievens, DeWitt added, was “very, very shocking to see.… This one wasn’t even cataloged. Or known.” By placing the supposed Rembrandt portrait next to one by Lievens, Schorer was trying to accomplish two things: first, to show an undisputed work compared to a disputed one from the same moment in time; second, to show how his ability to unearth sleepers can play a deeper role in scholarship. There was also a degree of showmanship to the scene; he was doing it, he said, “to throw meat to the wolves.”
Inquisitive visitors admired Schorer’s find. Whether by Rembrandt or not, it depicted a wizened man with a bulbous nose, wispy facial hair, and downcast eyes, his sad, thin lips parted in mid-sigh. He appeared to be homeless or a beggar—“a tramp,” someone suggested. The brushstrokes were loose and casual, in Rembrandt’s signature experimental style, but the artist still captured the sitter’s essence, his burden of worries, his frailty.
