Agnews Gallery announced the sale of Willem Drost’s exceptional 1654 oil on canvas, Man with a Plumed Red Beret, to The Leiden Collection, the world’s foremost private assemblage of Rembrandt and Rembrandt School paintings. Willem Drost (1633–1659), who was not previously represented in The Collection, was among Rembrandt’s most gifted and enigmatic pupils, studying with the master in the early 1650s. Throughout his brief career, tragically cut short when he died of pneumonia in Venice at age 25, Drost created powerful and exquisitely executed portrayals of the human figure. The entry of this masterpiece into The Leiden Collection marks a momentous event from both a curatorial and educational standpoint.

Rarely do artists capture the emotional energy that Drost achieves in this compelling image. The bearded man’s forceful pose commands the viewer’s attention. As he leans forward, gazing intently to the side, he gestures with an open hand in the opposite direction. He appears poised to speak—but to whom and why we do not know. The intensity also stems from Drost’s vigorous brushwork, his mastery of light, and his dramatic use of color in modelling the brilliant red, feathered beret, echoing scholar Jonathan Bikker’s broader insight about the artist’s concomitant filiation with, and distinctiveness from, Rembrandt: “In Man with a Plumed Red Beret, Drost demonstrates a command of the ‘rough manner’ that is indistinguishable from Rembrandt’s own work of the mid-1650s, yet he maintains a distinct, cooler emotional distance that is uniquely his own.” The sitter’s fanciful wardrobe, which is unrelated to seventeenth-century Dutch dress, identifies the work as a tronie—indeed the largest group of extant Rembrandtesque paintings by Drost are his tronies.

Provenance

Long admired by collectors and scholars, the painting enjoys a distinguished provenance. It passed through the hands of prominent Dutch and German eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors such as Maarseveen, Winckler, and Ritterich. From the second half of the nineteenth century, it belonged to four generations of the great Rothschild banking and collecting family, including Baron James de Rothschild in Paris—who also owned Rembrandt’s Standard Bearer, purchased by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 2022.

The property of some of the greatest collectors of the past four centuries, the work was also coveted and stolen by the Nazis, destined for the Führer Museum in Linz. In a now-famous photograph taken after Hitler’s defeat, the American Monuments Men can be seen carrying the painting to safety next to Vermeer’s famed The Art of Painting, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Man with a Plumed Red Beret was later returned to the Rothschild family, with whom it would remain until the 1990s when purchased by Jacqui Safra of the Safra banking dynasty.