Via David Packwood, I was made aware of the sale, last Friday at Moore, Allen & Innocent, for £2 million, of a Dutch 16th-Century portrait that the buyer and whoever he was bidding against evidently thought was a Rembrandt. Now, it certainly is a good-looking painting and evidently related to Rembrandt, but — at least judging from the low-quality reproduction available at the auction house’s site — this is pretty far from the real thing.

I am not a specialist, but to me the handling on the face, with its patchy application, and the superficially applied highlights on the tunic spell out Pastiche. Loudly. In the early period emulated here, Rembrandt did indeed apply paint in rather thick patches without blending a whole lot, but his results were still of a wholly different order of nuance. Packwood has an example up, which should demonstrate the difference in quality conclusively.

I am unfortunately not that well-versed in the work of Rembrandt’s students and artistic circle, but the suggestion made in the comments section of Packwood’s site, that it could well be by Isack Jouderville, seems convincing. Nice picture, but £2 million..?

The late work of Titian continues to fascinate. Inner effulgence emerging through broken, smouldering facture. A expressively spiritual presence. These are some of the qualities of the best, late works in paint by the master. Unprecedented in its embrace of colour as clay, of the gesture as art, and utterly devoid of ancillary concerns, yet fully continuous with the rest of his oeuvre, it appears the result of insights attained through a long life of painting as inquiry. A quintessential manifestation of the romantic notion of an Altersstil as the last testament of the singular artistic genius.

The latest affirmation of the late work’s enduring appeal are two ambitious and grandly conceived exhibitions, concentrating on the last twenty years or so of Titian’s career. Without a doubt the most assertive and incontrovertible is “Der Späte Tizian und die Sinnlichkeit der Malerei” (“Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting,” reviewed here) in Vienna, which opened last week and collects the majority of his supreme late masterpieces under one roof. (More on that once I get to see it) The other is the odder, more idiosyncratic, but nevertheless greatly interesting show “Tiziano — L’Ultimo atto” (“Titian — The Last Act”) in the small town of Belluno in the foothills of the Dolomites, with an outreach to Titian’s hometown of Pieve di Cadore, further on up.