Purported Rembrandt Painting Found in a Maine Attic Sells for $1.4 Million

The attic, long a repository of discarded toys and the like, can sometimes turn up treasures.

Late last month, a painting that an auctioneer in Maine discovered and believed to be a work by the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn was sold at auction for $1.4 million. The artwork had apparently been stored in the attic of a farmhouse in Camden, Me., for decades.

Kaja Veilleux, the owner, appraiser and auctioneer of Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in Maine, said he found the painting, “Portrait of a Young Girl,” on a routine house call. It was among a stack of paintings that he came across while looking through the belongings of a wealthy family’s estate.

Mr. Veilleux said in a phone interview that he recognized Rembrandt’s style “right away.”

The painting, which shows the girl in a black dress with a white ruffled collar and a white cap, is in pristine condition, Mr. Veilleux said. The portrait was not signed, which is not entirely unusual: Rembrandt did not sign all of his paintings.

The portrait was painted on a cradled oak panel and mounted in a hand-carved gold Dutch frame, according to the auction house. A label on the back of the frame attributed the work to Rembrandt, and said that it had been displayed in a 1970 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Maggie Fairs, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said in an email that the museum had looked into it but that it was too hard to confirm if and when the painting had been on display at the museum because of the decades that had passed.

Nine people bid on the painting, which sold in August to an unknown European bidder for $1.4 million, making it the auction house’s most expensive painting ever sold. (The owners, as well as the buyer, remained anonymous.)