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Artist

Monogrammist I.S.

Year
Act. 1633 - 1658
Price range
500,000 – 3,000,000 USD
The Monogrammist I.S. is an elusive figure who worked in the circle of Rembrandt and is believed to have worked in Leiden in the 1630s.

In 1904 his artistic identity was first established, based on a group of works signed with the monogram ‘I.S.’. Opinions vary as to whether he was originally a German, Baltic or a Dutch-born painter, but the consensus is that he worked in Leiden in the 1630s, as his refined, articulated brushwork, his subject-matter and his almost scientific realism reflect the influence of the then relatively unknown work of the young Rembrandt (1606–69) and other painters in his milieu, notably, the Leiden Fijnschilder Gerrit Dou (1613–75). The earliest work by the Monogrammist I.S. is dated 1632, two years after Rembrandt’s departure for Amsterdam. David de Witt, chief curator at the Museum het Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam, proposes that the Monogrammist I.S. was Dutch but travelled east via Scandinavia. His known oeuvre consists exclusively of portrayals of single figures, either ‘tronies’ or actual portraits.

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Selected artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

210,458 $
2001
441,600 $
2005
911,351 $
2010

Details

The sales are: Sotheby’s London – 26 Apr 2001 lot 48 (146,500 GBP), Christie’s New York – 26 Jan 2005 lot 20, and Sotheby’s London – 8 Dec 2010 lot 25 (577,250 GBP).
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Books on the Monogrammist I.S.

Arthur Wheelock, ‘Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie in Seventeenth-Century Leiden’ in Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Tronies, New York, 2019.

Leon Krempel, Marlene Dumas: Tronies, Düsseldorf, 2010.

Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt Schüler, vol. IV, Landua/Pfalz, 1983.

Theodor von Frimmel, ‘Von Monogrammisten IS’, Blatten für Gemäldekunde, 1904.

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