A 17th-century Dutch painting, owned by the National Gallery of Ireland and depicting a bottom-smacking game, has been confirmed as being by Rembrandt van Rijn.
A small oil on oak panel measuring 20cm by 26cm, the picture, La Main Chaude, was purchased for £20 for the gallery in 1896. At the time it was believed to have been painted by another 17th-century Dutch artist, Willem de Porter, although in an NGI catalogue published 15 years ago this opinion was revised in favour of the School of Rembrandt.
While it is almost impossible to judge the precise value of La Main Chaude, it is certainly now worth millions of pounds. Last December, a portrait of a female by Rembrandt sold for almost £20 million sterling in London, and in January his Portrait of a Bearded Man fetched more than $12.5 million in New York.
The latest attribution has been made by the Rembrandt Research Project in Amsterdam, responsible since 1968 for confirming the authenticity of pictures by the Dutch master in collections around the world.
The project has often encountered controversy because of its tendency to remove the Rembrandt attribution from many paintings. However, the organisation's director, Prof Ernst van de Wetering, recently analysed the NGI painting and yesterday declared himself "convinced that this is an autograph work by Rembrandt, painted around 1628".
Although the work was considered to be from the hand of Rembrandt as early as 1906, when the Irish art critic Ellen Duncan suggested such a possibility in the Burlington Magazine, one reason for the delay in confirming the attribution has been the rarity of genre scenes among the painter's early work.
Analysis of the wood on which the picture was painted has dated it to about 1625. The panel was originally used for a portrait, which can be seen by X-ray.