He spots a painting of a young man in the Christie’s catalogue that’s described as being in the Rembrandt family - that is, painted by an associate. The film’s essential narrative gathers around Jan Six, a sleek descendant of Rembrandt’s whose family owns a number of them (including the 1654 “Portrait of Jan Six,” a painting of his insinuating orange-mop-topped ancestor). (The Duke refers to the “Old Woman, Reading” as “her,” as if she were a live presence, with such casual persistence that at times he sounds like an art-patron version of Norman Bates.) Yet Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and “My Rembrandt” is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego. What unites all these people is their maniacal passion for Rembrandt, and that’s a great lens through which to experience the paintings. Viewed up close, it’s a mass of thick brush strokes from a few feet away, it comes close to being a photograph of ravaged despair. At one point we see Kaplan looking, spellbound, at his favorite Rembrandt - a painting the size of a baseball card that depicts a man who looks like the derelict on the cover of “Aqualung” as if he were King Lear.
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Kaplan, the investment billionaire who used his fortune to start snapping up Rembrandts - though unlike the collectors who keep paintings hidden away, he makes a point of displaying them in museums. Some of the film’s subjects are collectors, like Thomas S. In the estate, his favorite thing to do is to sit with a book and a glass of whiskey underneath “Old Woman, Reading,” the portrait of a hooded lady, her heavy-lidded eyes downcast, her lips taut with pensive judgment, as she focuses on the book in front of her the more you look, the more you see everything about her that’s not limited to her reaction to that book. A few of them have had the works in their families for generations, like the Duke of Buccleuch, a Scottish aristocrat who lives in a castle on 80,000 misty green acres of God’s countryside.
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Yet the movie is also about money, power, and the elusive mystique of “value.” The Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk takes us inside the stately European homes, many of them quite old, of private citizens who own Rembrandts.