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Art from a master in Myrtle Creek? Photo by Steve Johnson Pat, left, and Ed Andersen (above) talk in their Myrtle Creek home about their campaign to authenticate what they say is a chalk drawing (right) by Rembrandt van Rijn. The portrait at right is a photograph of "Portrait of Titus van Rijn as a Boy," an oil painting owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is identical in appearance to the Andersens' drawing. Experts turn up noses at possible Rembrandt By BILL VARBLE Ed and Pat Andersen bought the drawing they say is a Rembrandt in a second-hand store. They paid $37.50 mainly because they liked the frame. On Feb. 4 the artwork goes on sale on a Web site where it's listed as a Rembrandt. While the Andersens don't want to give away the minimum bid they have in mind, figure on going at least seven digits before you reach for your checkbook. Photos from Ed and Pat Andersen The photograph at left is the date as it appears on Ed Andersen's chalk drawing. The photograph at right, taken with a very large format camera, appears to show that the date should be 1634 -- not 1655, the date that appears on the painting owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other arguments In addition to scientific tests that suggest their picture could be a Rembrandt, Ed and Pat Andersen press several other arguments: "Study" vs. "painting" -- Author and art historian Malcom Bell viewed the artwork twice in the 19th century and called it a "study," a term he applied to works on paper. The Met's "Titus" is an oil on canvas. Ed Andersen believes the artwork Bell was looking at is his. Miscues -- Andersen says the Met's painting has details which make sense only if they were copied from a time-worn original, including a smudge on an eye and a feather on the hat that is actually a copy of a damaged area on the drawing. The date -- The Andersens say their drawing is dated 1634, but time -- and possibly routine dusting of the painting by owners -- obscured parts of the numbers. The result was that a copyist, duplicating what he saw, read and rendered the date as 1655, the incomplete date on the Met's painting. Andersen says a color lab in California used a very large format camera to take pictures of their picture. The results? The date was clearly 1634. He also used high-contrast Kodolith film, which takes out gray and heightens contrast. The resulting date? 1634. If that's true there's no way the thing could be Rembrandt's son Titus, because he wasn't yet born in 1634. "We know we've got a Rembrandt," says Ed Andersen, 71, holding a photo of the drawing in the living room of the Andersens' modest wood frame house in tiny Myrtle Creek. Auctioneer Bill Hicken of International Art Auction says in a telephone interview that prospective buyers are welcome to have their own experts examine the artwork. "I am not an art expert," he says. "But the paper is 350 years old. If it's a forgery, it's a damn good one." For more on the auction, go to the International Auction Network at www.ian.com or telephone (843) 577-3000. The image is of a boy of 13 or 14 with a plumed hat and a sweet expression. The Andersens say the original, which was done in charcoal, red and black chalk, watercolor, India ink and bister (a pigment made from soot) on paper, is in a bank vault in Washington. Called "A Young Polish Prince" on the auction site, the 16-by-20-inch drawing is very similar to "Portrait of Titus van Rijn as a Boy," an oil painting traditionally attributed to Rembrandt and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for most of the 20th century. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the great masters of European art. He produced thousands of paintings, drawings and etchings. His work has been collected since the 17th century. The Andersens' story is one of indifference and rejection by the high-stakes art world, a world in which they're hardly at home. Ed Andersen spent his working years as a milkman and later an electrical foreman. Pat was a waitress. Ed claims to have become something of an expert on Rembrandt over the past three decades. A six-inch stack of files on the dining table and some well-worn Rembrandt books suggest some homework. "We've got two boxes of stuff," says Pat Andersen, a perky 62-year-old. After failing to interest art experts and museums in their find, the couple put the whole affair on the shelf for many years until a neighbor suggested an online auction. The auction is the latest chapter in a story that began one day in January 1970 in Lacey, Wash. Ed Andersen says he tried to tell the woman in Reed's Round House, a used furniture store there, that the thing was some kind of original work, not a print. All they wanted was the frame. The woman said she didn't want to take it out of the frame, Andersen says. "When she got persnickety, we wound up buying it," he says. The couple took the picture home, and that was that for a time. Then one night the light struck the picture just right and Pat Andersen suddenly saw the name Rembrandt and a fuzzy date she thought might be 1655. According to a seal on back, the framing was done at the Beard Art Gallery at Dayton's department store in Minneapolis, Minn., some time before 1905. The seller told the Andersens she bought it from an estate in California in the 1960s. In July 1970, after examining a photo of the Andersens' drawing, John Walsh Jr., a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote that the Andersens' picture was a copy of the Titus portrait at the Met. By then, however, Met officials were having qualms about their portrait. "We have serious doubts as to the authorship of our picture, feeling now that it was executed by a weaker hand than Rembrandt's, conceivably by an artist well after the 17th century," Walsh wrote. The Andersens' picture had "the character of a 19th century copy, both in the treatment of the face and in the choice of material, paper being practically never employed by 17th century artists for large replicas," Walsh said. Andersen claims Rembrandt in fact painted on paper throughout the 1630s. Rebuffed by the Met, the Andersens next took the drawing to be examined at a Boeing radiographic laboratory in Washington, where they then lived. The results were intriguing in that they revealed a number of sketches underneath the finished artwork. "This tends to prove that the drawing is an original since a print would not have under sketches," concluded the report, dated Sept. 24, 1973. Ed Andersen says undersketch themes uncovered by X-rays include a man's face, an eye, a lamb, cherubs and other figures. An enhanced copy of an image he says came up in very long-exposure X-rays appears to show a man with a beard in a tall hat. Andersen says the man appears often in Rembrandt's work. A drawing in the book "The World of Rembrandt" (Time Life) looks as if it could be the same man. Andersen says Rembrandt often sketched various subjects on the same paper because paper was expensive in the 17th century. Despite his fame and success (he had at least 50 students whose names we know), Rembrandt was not a rich man. Andersen will show you photos of paper covered in gesso (a mix of plaster of Paris and glue) which he says the great artist used as a painting surface. The Andersens' drawing was examined in 1976 by the Washington state printing department, which concluded the rendering "was in fact not a mechanical reproduction of any kind (but) rather an actual rendering," but added a caveat that the finding "in no way represents an effort to authenticate the rendering as an original Rembrandt." Ed Andersen's theory is that the Met's painting is a copy of their drawing, probably done by an artist using an opaque projection or a grid of squares. He figures a copycat artist simply painted what he could see, including a date, 1634, that was badly degraded from dusting or other wear and tear, which the artist misread as 1655. An entry in "Rembrandt, the Complete Edition of his Paintings," by A. Bredius, (Phaidon Publishers, 1969) in a note on the Met's "Titus" says, "As far as I know never doubted in the literature on Rembrandt, but certainly an 18th or 19th century imitation." The Met eventually took its Titus down, Andersen says. The museum had acquired as part of a bequest in 1911. Officials at the Met did not return several phone calls in time for this article. Other experts have told Andersen -- erroneously, he says -- that Rembrandt didn't use red hues, or paint "sweet" themes. Hicken says he's outraged at the treatment the Andersens have received. "They were just running into brick walls," he says. "The established art world is afraid of doing anything that would upset the Metropolitan Museum. "I'm not afraid of standing up to them. The more the experts bitch and scream this is a fake, we're just saying, let the facts speak for themselves." Hicken is a self-styled consumer advocate and the author of "The For Sale By Owner Homeowners' Guide Book," 1989, Data Press Int. "The Met is afraid of being embarrassed at having a forgery hanging there all those years," he says. But if what they have is really a Rembrandt, why did the Andersens wait all these years to try to cash in on their luck? "We didn't," Ed Andersen says. "We were trying. At first we had no proof. We didn't know anything." They traveled to New York City recently only to have a representative of a big gallery dismiss the picture out of hand. "These guys came up with the same b.s. I heard all those years ago," he says. "After years of these guys trying to put it down, we almost gave up. Until now." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA