BROOKLYN, NY.- A small, jewel-like portrait, circa 1631, that has been in the Brooklyn Museum collection since 1932 and has not been on public view since early 1945, has recently been reattributed to Rembrandt’s first pupil, Gerrit Dou. It has just been installed for the first time in the European painting galleries in the Beaux-Arts Court, where it will remain on long-term view.

The little panel painting, which measures slightly larger than 6 inches by 4 inches, arrived at Brooklyn as part of a bequest from the estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, manager and later president of the New Yorkbased department store B. Altman & Co.

Dou was one of the founding members of the Leiden “fine painters,” a group active in Leiden in the Netherlands from the early seventeenth through the late eighteenth century and known for its small, detailed paintings, often of genre scenes. By the early twentieth century, this style of painting was out of favor, and it was not until recent years that the work of these artists has been acknowledged as a highly important contribution to seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting.

When it first entered the Brooklyn Museum collection, the painting was fully attributed to Dou, whose portraits are rare because of his slow and obsessive working method. Scholars later questioned the attribution. When Curator of European Art Rich Aste joined the Brooklyn Museum staff last year, he began reviewing the collection. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Aste believed that several of the Museum’s Old Master paintings required reconsideration and felt that the Dou portrait was a particularly beautiful and compelling work.

Aste consulted George Wachter, Head of Old Master Paintings at Sotheby’s, known for his good eye for Dutch panel painting. Wachter, along with three scholars in the field, concurred that the tiny painting was indeed a Dou, as had originally been thought.

Aste and certain scholars also believe that the sitter is in fact the artist as a young man, possibly at age eighteen. If the subject is indeed Dou, Brooklyn’s painting would be the artist’s earliest surviving self-portrait