Portrait of a Girl

An unsigned seventeenth-century panel found in the attic of an estate in Camden, Maine, catalogued against an estimate of ten to fifteen thousand dollars, and sold in August 2024 for well over a hundred times that figure. It is the clearest recent demonstration of what a saleroom actually prices: not a certainty, but a possibility that enough bidders were willing to pay for.

The attribution has never been settled. Press coverage has called it a Rembrandt, an after-Rembrandt and a circle-of-Rembrandt picture in the space of a single week, and no authentication body has published a ruling. The one hard documentary link in its history is a label on the reverse of the frame recording a loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970, which establishes that the panel was in the United States and considered exhibitable more than half a century before it surfaced.

The reported price also diverges. Figures of roughly 1.2 and 1.4 million dollars both circulated, which is the ordinary consequence of some outlets reporting the hammer and others the premium-inclusive total without saying which.