Old master, new hands.(Rembrandt's 'Minerva in Her Study')

The most expensive Old Master painting currently known to be for sale anywhere in the world is a Rembrandt, painted in 1635, that has just been brought to the market by a gallery on the Upper East Side. It costs forty million dollars. The gallery is Otto Naumann, at 22 East Eightieth Street, a town house, and as you walk in the door you see the painting ahead of you and slightly to the left. It is called "Minerva in Her Study," after the goddess of wisdom and war.

Otto Naumann has an oval face, brown eyes, and a blond beard that has gone gray. He has an identical twin, Francis, who has a gallery upstairs. He likes to collect portraits in pairs -- mainly husbands and wives. Of the more than five hundred paintings attributed to Rembrandt forty years ago, he says, fewer than three hundred are now accepted as authentic. About half of these are portraits. In addition, Rembrandt made perhaps a hundred history paintings. "Minerva" is probably the last that will ever freely change hands. All but two of the others are in museums. Those two are in England and are unlikely to receive licenses to leave.

The first person known to have owned "Minerva" was James, Lord Somerville, who bought the painting around 1720. For some two hundred years, the painting hung in his house in Scotland. In 1924, the picture was bought at auction by Lord Duveen, the world's most famous art dealer. Another owner was Axel Wenner-Gren, who also owned the company that made the Electrolux vacuum cleaner. The last time "Minerva" was offered to the public, at auction in 1975, it was bought by Baron Marcel Bich, who invented the Bic pen. About fifteen years ago, he went partners with a Japanese company in the building of a golf course near Paris, and in 1988 he sold the company "Minerva."

Last spring, the painting was sent to Holland for a show. The morning after the show ended, Otto Naumann left New York, flew to Amsterdam, took a taxi to a warehouse next to the ...