A cloud hangs over Rembrandt at the Fogg

Is one of Harvard's two priceless Rembrandt paintings a fake? As they say on Fox News, I'll report, you decide.

In a forthcoming biography of the colorful Hollywood artist, bon vivant, and art forger John Decker, Stephen Jordan includes an account of how Decker and his friend Will Fowler forged a Rembrandt "Bust of Christ" for actor ("Stagecoach," "Gone With the Wind," "Lost Horizon") Thomas Mitchell, an amateur art collector. "Not long after Mitchell passed away," Jordan writes, "the painting fetched $35,000 as an early Rembrandt. Today, the painting hangs at Harvard University's prestigious Fogg Art Museum -- hailed as a true Rembrandt."

Jordan, a lawyer based in Portland, Maine, working with researchers Leslee Mayo and Charles Heard, has mounted an impressive case. He interviewed Fowler several times before his death. Some details of the claimed forgery -- the precise size, the subject, and a panel that Decker deliberately cracked to make the painting seem older and more realistic -- match up perfectly with the Fogg's painting.

Furthermore, it is hardly encouraging to learn that Decker paid Wilhelm Valentiner, then the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Art, $600 for a letter of authentication. Valentiner, also once director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, was a towering, if controversial, figure in the art world. He at one time or another "authenticated" 700 Rembrandts, about half of which proved to be, well, not Rembrandts. "Tribulations about attributions repeatedly disturbed Valentiner's museum career," according to his biographer Margaret Sterne.

There is other evidence suggesting the painting is a fake. Harvard professor emeritus Seymour Slive, who arranged for the painting to be bought for the Fogg by William Coolidge in 1964, told an interviewer that the $35,000 purchase price "was not a Rembrandt price." More to the point, there is no evidence at all of the painting's existence before 1939, the year that Decker supposedly created the "Bust" for his client Mitchell.

Fogg curator Ivan Gaskell admits that the official story of the painting's provenance -- the museum's data sheet parrots a scarcely believable claim about the painting having belonged to an unnamed Polish count, whose records disappeared during World War II -- "stinks." "This is red flag stuff," he says. "You see that and you wonder, `What's going on here?' "

To be fair, Gaskell strongly believes Harvard's "Bust" is a 17th-century Dutch painting, if not necessarily a Rembrandt. And if it wasn't a Rembrandt, the "Bust" would have plenty of company. "Far more Rembrandt paintings seem to have been bought and hung than the artist ever produced," The Atlantic Monthly noted in 1986. In the past few decades, hundreds of "Rembrandts" have been reclassified as the work of students or as fakes. In 1996, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted a whole show, "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt," to the roiled field of Old Masters connoisseurship.

The trump card in Harvard's hand is a dendrochronological analysis of the painting commissioned by the Fogg in 1977. Gaskell compares this technique to "fingerprinting," and accurately dating, the wood in the Harvard "Bust." The test reported that the Harvard painting was on the same wood as another Rembrandt, "Portrait of a Young Jew," that hangs in Berlin.

Gaskell calls the wood test "a contributory factor, but it's not the only piece of evidence" that the "Bust" is authentic. "There is nothing to suggest that this is anything other than a 17th-century painting on a 17th-century panel," he says. "This is my field of scholarly specialization. One must be open to the possibility that it's a forgery, but it's highly unlikely."

Slive points out that the "Bust," which once hung in his office, is one of a group of Rembrandt renderings of Christ's visage; "The idea that a forger sitting in Southern California was making another one of this group, I find highly improbable."

He says it's a Rembrandt, for sure. Gaskell says it's a 17th-century Dutch painting, for certain. Jordan & Co. say it's a fake. Do your own sleuthing! The "Bust of Christ" goes back on display at the Fogg today after a long time on the sidelines. Admission is free for Harvard and Cambridge types, $6.50 for the unwashed.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.