Leiden Collection Buys Its 18th Rembrandt: Saint John on Patmos
The Leiden Collection has its eighteenth Rembrandt. On 28 September 2026 Thomas Kaplan’s New York collection announced the purchase of Saint John on Patmos (c. 1661), a late canvas in which the sitter is the painter’s son, Titus. For a century the picture was read as a portrait. Cleaning before the December 2025 sale brought a palm tree and an eagle out of the background. The island is Patmos. The bird is the evangelist’s. The face is still Titus.
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What: Leiden Collection acquires Rembrandt’s Saint John on Patmos (c. 1661), its 18th painting by the artist
Where: Leiden Collection, New York; bought at Sotheby’s London
When: Announced 28 September 2026; sold 3 December 2025 for £6.75 million (≈ $9 million) with fees
Who: Thomas S. Kaplan; Arthur Wheelock on the attribution; first public showing planned in a European tour, autumn 2027
Section: Discoveries & Restorations
What happened
Sotheby’s London sold the canvas on 3 December 2025, lot 16 of the Old Master evening sale, for £6.75 million including fees, about $9 million. The buyer was not named that night. On 28 September 2026 The Art Newspaper identified him: Thomas Kaplan, whose Leiden Collection now holds eighteen paintings by Rembrandt. The purchase price after the auction has not been published. The figure above is the hammer result with fees.
The subject had been hiding in plain sight. Specialists knew the picture from a grainy photograph of the 1920s and called it a portrait of Titus. Cleaning and technical study in 2025, before the sale, recovered a palm, the sign of Patmos, and the profile of an eagle, the emblem of Saint John. Titus is the model. The hands rest on a bound manuscript, the book of the vision he is about to write.
Why it matters
Arthur Wheelock places the canvas next to the apostles and evangelists of 1661, Rembrandt at the height of that late manner. The underpainting, exposed in the cleaning, is wet-in-wet and quick. The sacred figure is built from a face the painter knew. That is the news inside the acquisition: not only an eighteenth Rembrandt, but a Rembrandt that had been filed under the wrong title for a century.
The provenance is the other half. In 1904 an American dealer sold it for $160 as a Carel Fabritius. In 1913 Wilhelm Valentiner bought it for $525 and recognised both the hand and the son. Fritz Thyssen owned it from the mid-1920s. The Nazis seized it in 1940. It was returned to Thyssen in 1950, passed to his grandson Federico Zichy Thyssen, and after his death in 2014 to a family foundation. Apart from a brief view at Sotheby’s, it had been out of public sight for more than a hundred years. Kaplan says it will travel with the collection’s lending tour. A European showing of part of the collection is planned for autumn 2027.
The painting behind the story
Oil on canvas, 81.3 by 62.9 centimetres, about 1661, inventory RR-129. The young evangelist is the conventional type, long curling hair, the look Rembrandt had already used for Titus. A year earlier he had painted that same face in a monk’s habit, the canvas now in the Rijksmuseum and shown above. Without the palm and the eagle the new picture is a tender head. With them it is an exile, and a father painting his son as the man who wrote the end of the world.
The 1661 canvas is not in the print shop. The photograph released with the announcement belongs to the Leiden Collection. The print is the Rijksmuseum picture of 1660.
For another journey through the history hidden behind a masterpiece, explore the Sapiens Verbum essays on the artists, paintings and collections that shaped European art.
See Rembrandt’s Titus as a Monk — the face of the new Saint John, painted a year earlier — framed on your wall.
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💬 Over to you: A portrait that turned out to be an exile, bought for $160 in 1904 and for £6.75 million in 2025. Would you rather see it in 2027, or keep calling it Titus? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
The Art Newspaper — Buyer of the £6.75m Rembrandt revealed, 28 September 2026
Leiden Collection — press release, 18th Rembrandt, 28 September 2026
ArtDaily — Leiden Collection acquires its 18th Rembrandt, 7 October 2026
Rijksmuseum — Rembrandt, Titus in a Monk’s Habit, 1660, SK-A-3138
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