For decades it sat in a New Jersey family’s home as a dark little picture nobody thought much about. In 2015 a local auction house catalogued it as an anonymous Continental painting and estimated it at a few hundred dollars. It turned out to be one of the earliest known paintings by Rembrandt, made when he was a teenager.
The story of Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell) has been spreading widely online again this week. Here is what actually happened, and why the painting matters.
An $800 estimate, an $870,000 result
The small oil on panel had belonged to the Rappoport family since before the Great Depression, when Philip Rappoport, a silk manufacturer, bought it. In September 2015 relatives consigned it to Nye & Company, an auction house in Bloomfield, New Jersey, which estimated it at $500 to $800.
Two dealers from Paris, Bertrand Talabardon and Bertrand Gautier, recognised something under the grime. The bidding ran far past the estimate, and their gallery bought the painting for $870,000, or more than $1 million with fees, according to The Art Newspaper.
After cleaning and study, specialists accepted it as an early work by Rembrandt, painted around 1624 or 1625, when he was about 18 and still working in his home town of Leiden.
One of five senses
The panel belongs to a series of small allegories of the five senses, the young Rembrandt’s earliest known group of paintings. Each shows ordinary people acting out one of the senses. In Smell, a young man who has fainted is being revived by a figure holding something to his nose.
Three other panels survive. Three Musicians (Allegory of Hearing) and Stone Operation (Allegory of Touch) are in the Leiden Collection, the private collection of Dutch Old Masters formed by the American investor Thomas Kaplan. The Spectacles Seller (Allegory of Sight) belongs to Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. The fifth, Taste, has never been found.
Kaplan later bought Unconscious Patient from the Paris dealers for a reported $4 million, reuniting it with two of its companions.
A family dispute
The find also split the family. In 2021 Jay Rappoport, a grandson of the original buyer, sued relatives, the auction house, Kaplan and the Leiden Collection in New York, arguing the painting had been sold without his consent as an heir. Kaplan’s lawyer called the claim without merit. The case was dismissed in 2022, and the dismissal was upheld on appeal in 2023.
Why it still fascinates
The picture is rough in places, as you might expect from a teenager. But it already shows things that would define Rembrandt: a taste for everyday drama, expressive faces and theatrical light. For collectors, it is also a reminder that even a Rembrandt can slip through a provincial saleroom when it is dirty, unsigned and mislabelled.
There is still one sense missing. Somewhere, perhaps in another family’s basement, Rembrandt’s Allegory of Taste may be waiting.