In 2020, This Drawing Was Worth $200—Now It’s Worth $1.44 Million

It’s the kind of moment an art dealer lives for: the discovery of a rare work tucked away in an otherwise average assortment of auction lots. Even rarer still is uncovering a massively undervalued drawing by a Dutch master that hadn’t been spotted in 132 years. That’s exactly the backstory of how Christopher Bishop got his hands on a drawing by 17th-century painter Jan Lievens from a small Massachusetts auction house in 2020, where it was initially valued between $200 and $300. By the end of this month, it could fetch somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.44 million back in Lievens’s homeland, the Netherlands.

The work is a formal portrait of Maarten Tromp, the commander of the Dutch Navy, who sat for the artist only a year before his death in a sea battle with the English. Over the centuries since, Tromp has been an icon of national pride in the Netherlands, even appearing on Dutch postage stamps while the country was under Nazi occupation at the height of World War II.

As befits a valuable piece mired in obscurity, the life of this Lievens drawing has been an interesting one. First used as the basis for oil paintings of Tromp, the drawing was the foundation for print reproductions, as it shows evidence of having been pinned onto an engraving plate. The ownership of this particular drawing was last shown at an 1888 auction in Frankfurt, with its whereabouts between then and 2020 quite unknown.

Considering that a second Lievens drawing of Tromp and an oil painting based on this particular drawing sit in the British Museum’s collection, it’s a mystery as to how it remained unaccounted for for so long. However, Christopher Bishop’s mid-pandemic digging through online auctions led him to the drawing, listed as “an unidentified gentleman, initialed I.L., and dated 1652” by Marion Antique Auction House.

Bishop’s knowledge that a J often resembled an I in 17th-century signatures gave him a hunch that he was onto something special. That suspicion was soon confirmed by the flurry of interest in the run-up to the October 2020 auction. With 15 potential bidders, the price shot up to $514,800 when all was said and done, even if Bishop wasn’t 100% sure that he’d purchased a genuine work when the gavel struck.