Franco-American precious metals mogul Tom Kaplan will sell a Rembrandt in order to raise funds for a wild cat conservation charity, he told Spear’s.
The Rembrandt drawing, titled Young Lion Resting (circa 1638-42), has a high estimate of $20 million and will hit the auction block at Sotheby’s in New York in February. Kaplan will donate the proceeds to Panthera, the wild cat conservation charity he founded in 2006.
The work is part of a trove of 17th-century Dutch Golden Age art that the billionaire and his wife, Daphne, have collected over the last two decades. Dubbed The Leiden Collection, it includes the world’s largest private cache of Rembrandt paintings (17) and the only Vermeer in private hands.
Young Lion Resting was displayed at a lunch in Paris this week, where around 20 art experts and members of the press were present, alongside Sotheby’s experts.
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Skilfully rendered in black and white chalk on brown paper, the drawing is one of only six lion drawings Rembrandt made.
Midway through a first course of foie gras, Sotheby’s head of Old Master drawings, Gregory Rubinstein, stood up from the table to wax lyrical about the drawing. ‘The work has been unveiled today, which I hope stimulates considerable excitement,’ he said. ‘When Rembrandt made the drawing, he had moved from his native Leiden to Amsterdam. At this point, he had established himself as an extremely popular and fashionable portraitist. The works he made at that time are characterised by ever more energy, confidence, power and passion, and all of those qualities are abundantly clear and evident in this remarkable drawing.’
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Kaplan explained how he acquired the work on paper through New York dealer Otto Nauman in 2005. ‘He called me up and he said he had seen something totally unique, and that I needed to check it out because of my passion for lions and Rembrandt,’ Kaplan said. ‘We went to see the drawing at John and Paul Herring’s gallery. It would’ve been the most expensive thing my wife and I had ever bought, even among our paintings at the time. That day, when we got home, I asked my wife what she thought, and she said: “Tom. It’s a Rembrandt. It’s a lion. And it’s beautiful. If it’s not for you, then who is it for?”’
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Kaplan’s passion for wild cats, which he told Spear’s is greater than his passion for art, began in childhood in Fort Lauderdale, where he tracked bobcats for fun instead of playing baseball. His charity Panthera is devoted to preserving the 40 species of wild cats and their critical role in the world’s ecosystems.
He added that he and his wife have never been interested in material things or the ‘social aspects of collecting’. They don’t ‘live with the Rembrandts’, however, which he described as a ‘lending library’.
Works from The Leiden Collection have been loaned to more than 80 museums – among them the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Museum of China, and the Louvre.
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Kaplan said that when the latter borrowed 11 Rembrandts in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron told him he was so popular in France ‘that if you ran against me, you might win’.
Up until then, the Kaplans had largely lent their works anonymously but, Kaplan told Spear’s, the couple chose to go public to further the cause of Panthera and help the Rembrandt collection enter the public domain, ‘because our mission was for them to be seen’.
The turning point came when Arthur Wheelock, the National Gallery of Art’s curator of Northern Baroque painting, urged Kaplan to take the collection public. ‘I was crossing the Rubicon, because every time I put myself out there in the public, I know that the Kaplans become the story very quicky,’ Kaplan said. ‘I had to come to terms with that. It doesn’t take a genius to buy Rembrandt. It takes a genius to be Rembrandt… It’s not about the collector, it’s about the artist. Going public wasn’t an act of self-promotion, but an effort to highlight Rembrandt’s enduring human and artistic values.’
Rembrandt’s auction record stands at $33.2 million, set in 2009 when Sotheby’s sold his Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo (1658). The highest price for one of his drawings was set in 2000 for The Bulwark de Rose and the Windmill de Smeerpot, Amsterdam (circa 1649-52), which fetched $3.7 million at Christie’s in New York. This pales in comparison to the $48 million a private collector forked out for Raphael’s Head of Apostle (circa 1519), the current auction record for a work on paper. While Young Lion Resting is unlikely to dethrone Raphael, Sotheby’s described it as the ‘most important Rembrandt drawing to hit the market in half a century’.
Kaplan has previously hinted at plans to ‘fractionalise’ his Rembrandt collection – a move that could be facilitated with the use of blockchain technology.
He told Spear’s: ‘I want to do it right, because there are other easier ways to monetise the world’s largest Rembrandt collection. If I can’t do it in a way that truly democratises them, then what’s the point?’
