The news was first reported by
El diario del fin del mundo
.
The local newspaper of Ushuaia, the city in the furthest corner of southern Argentina, reported a few weeks ago that one of its illustrious residents had found a 17th century painting.
A biblical scene, a baroque painting, an unknown treasure that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Liu Zhinjiang, a Chinese businessman who divides his time between running a colossal hake fishing vessel and collecting art, had no doubts: the painting was a lost Rembrandt canvas, and he could prove it.
The news then reached the big national newspapers.
What was a work by the great Dutch master doing in the furthest corner of Patagonia?
Liu Zhinjiang was born in the city of Jinan, some 400 kilometers south of Beijing, 55 years ago.
Lively, small and courteous, he speaks rapid Spanish, with a thick Argentine accent that attests to half a life lived in the country.
Zhinjiang studied fisheries engineering at a technological institute in China and, after finishing, lived for a couple of years in the Canary Islands, where he began working in fisheries off the coast of Morocco.
He landed in southern Argentina in 1994. "I watched Ushuaia grow," he says.
“When I arrived there were about 20,000 inhabitants, there were hardly any houses.
Now we are a city of more than 80,000 people.
Since I have lived there, eight governments have passed in the province.
I'm still there."
Zhinjiang receives this newspaper in its office in downtown Buenos Aires.
It is a Thursday at the end of an intense April: the economic crisis has already broken all the barriers of year-on-year inflation with 104% and the Argentine government is looking for dollars in exports to stop the fall of the national currency.
The businessman, president of Prodesur, a company with a 100-meter ship and 200 employees that manufactures surimi for export in the Argentine sea, has arrived in the city to meet with authorities from the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.
He incidentally takes the opportunity to show part of his art collection to some visitors.
Among a score of paintings, some Chinese porcelain and figures carved in ivory, his latest treasure, the pure unframed canvas, rests on the floor between two thick sheets of polystyrene.
Jacob introducing himself to Raquel, the scene of the first rapprochement in a long love story that gives rise to the tribes of Israel according to the Old Testament, dazzled him when he saw it for the first time four years ago in a gallery in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo.
“An old contact who works with me called me.
He got it from a German family that he wanted to sell because they needed the money,” says Zhinjiang.
“She was very dirty, she didn't look good.
But the girl's look impressed me.
It's like she's showing the aura,” she says.
'Jacob and Rachel Meeting at the Water Well', the painting of unknown authorship that its owner attributes to Rembrandt. Courtesy Liu Zhinjiang
He claims he bought it for $20,000.
Zhinjiang spent the pandemic lockdown staring at the painting.
The look of young Raquel, who attends to Jacob's courtship before her father, inspired her to write a novel: the story of a young couple who find a Rembrandt
in
the galleries surrounding the San Telmo antiques market and change their minds. luck.
He is now looking for a production company to shoot a movie with the story.
She has also baptized with the name of the painting,
Meeting of Jacob and Raquel at the well of water
, a real estate project in Ushuaia.
But the most ambitious project, which led him to the newspapers and local television, is to build a museum in that town next year.
The painting would be the centerpiece of a collection of 200 paintings and 300 other objects that he has bought in all these years in Buenos Aires.
No one has certified that the painting could be by Rembrandt.
The vast work of the Dutch master, who made a school and died bankrupt in Amsterdam, liquidating his last pieces until 1669, has been the subject of controversy for decades.
The latest consensus among specialists has a list of approximately 350 paintings and hundreds of drawings that have been scrutinized with special zeal since the Dutch government financed the creation of the Rembrandt Research Project in 1968 to refine a catalog that in 1930 listed more than 600 pieces. .
Rembrandt painted, taught to paint and sold.
Counterfeits and frauds have gone around the world.
The ball that a
rembrandt
had been found in Patagonia started rolling because of a restoration report taken out of context.
In the middle of last year, Zhinjiang had contacted the Center for Research in Art, Matter and Culture of the Tres de Febrero University of Buenos Aires to restore the painting of him.
The final report of this institution never mentions an author.
He talks about an oil on canvas, by an anonymous author, that "evidences multiple previous treatments" and that "closely follows a painting by the Neapolitan Luca Giordano dated at the end of the 17th century."
The study did detail some materials found in the work.
The natural, plant-based fibers, which the studio describes as “possibly linen” on the original canvas, is a clue to a “pre-industrial fabric, consistent with proposed dating” by its current owner.
The use of lead, iron, aluminum, sulfur, and potassium in the preparation of white and blue pigments is also consistent with how they were prepared and traded between the 17th and 18th centuries.
Those details, plus the choice of a religious theme and the similarity to Giordano's painting, led Zhinjiang to draw his own conclusions from him.
"Giordano copied, I think he saw this painting and imitated it," he says about the work of the Neapolitan, part of the collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid.
“For the colors, for the depth, for the look of the girl,
I think it's by Rembrandt," he says.
His painting signature was lost between the purchase and the restoration process.
Zhinjiang shows his painting, this week in Buenos Aires.Valentina Fusco
Tres de Febrero University cannot certify the age or authorship of a painting.
"No
rembrandt entered our center
not even one came out”, says the director of the Research Center, the expert in the history of colonial art and materials, Gabriela Siracusano.
"We only do chemical, historical and scientific research", she settles her.
“The analysis of pigments, of materials, is not very useful.
When one works to certify a work of art, this represents only 3%”, says Ángel Navarro, curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and one of the greatest Argentine experts in European art of the time.
"What matters most is the stylistic question."
The expert was also able to see the painting this week.
His opinion is definitive: “When I saw it, I realized that it was an Italian painting, it has nothing to do with Dutch painting.
This is a kind of
boutade
”.
Zhinjiang now hopes that the mystery of the origin of his painting can be cleared up.
For him it will be a
rembrandt
until he can trace the true origin of it.
“I don't like cigarettes, I don't drink, I don't go to the casino.
My only vice is art, ”he says in his office surrounded by paintings.
All the European art he has collected has a pattern of origin: painting from Italy, Germany and Spain that probably entered the country after World War II.
Relics of the Nazi regime have been found in Argentina, but Navarro, who studied the subject, clarifies that no German collection that has been released to the public included significant works.
the
rembrandt
de la Patagonia is, until now, a treasure in the eyes of its owner.
Its origin is still up in the air, although the story ends in a movie and in a museum at the end of the world.
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