Rembrandt buyer revealed: Kaplan adds £6.75m St John to Leiden Collection
The mystery buyer of Rembrandt's St John on Patmos is Thomas Kaplan, the New York-based owner of the Leiden Collection.
The identity was reported on 28 September 2026, after the oil-on-canvas painting sold for £6.75 million (US$9 million) at Sotheby's in London The Art Newspaper. The price sat inside the estimate range of £5 million to £7 million published by the auction house Sotheby's.
Sotheby's offered the work in its Old Master and 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction. The house dates the picture to around 1661, late in Rembrandt's life. It shows St John half-length, hands folded on a book cover, with a palm tree behind him and his eagle beside him in pilgrim's attire on the island of Patmos.
Few pictures come with this much paperwork. The painting's provenance, the documented chain of ownership, runs from misidentification to seizure and return.
In 1904 it was attributed to Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt, and sold for US$160. In 1913 it was bought for US$525 by Wilhelm Valentiner, the German art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who recognised it as a Rembrandt. Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, bought it in 1923 or soon after. It was seized by the Nazis in 1940 and restituted to Thyssen in 1950.
Thyssen sent the painting to Buenos Aires just before his death in January 1951. It was later inherited by his grandson Federico Zichy Thyssen, who died in 2014, after which it passed to a family charitable foundation. It was last exhibited in 1923.
Then the image changed. Cleaning and conservation revealed a palm tree and an eagle in the background. The subject was reidentified as St John on Patmos, not Titus, the artist's son, as had long been thought. Sotheby's notes the canvas was reduced, probably on all four sides.
For Kaplan, it is the 18th painting by Rembrandt acquired for his collection in the past two decades. The Leiden Collection, founded by Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan, is a private collection of 17th-century Dutch art. Earlier in 2026, Kaplan sold Rembrandt's drawing Young Lion Resting at Sotheby's for nearly US$18 million, with proceeds creating an endowment for Panthera, the big-cat conservation organisation.
What makes this stand out is the century out of view. A work last shown when Thyssen bought it has moved from a family foundation back into a collection built to lend and exhibit Dutch painting.
