Provenance

The very last thing that Professor Sabine Simon Elsberg would ever have expected to see while visiting a small college in Brooklyn was the painting that had belonged to her family for hundreds of years, but which she had not seen since she was a child during the war. Although she had absolutely no idea why it had suddenly appeared nearly a half-century later and thousands of miles from where it once hung in her childhood home, she was determined to find the answer. The fateful struggles of a promising young painter during the height of the Dutch Golden Age, the perilous escape of a desperate Jewish family from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and the tenacious quest of a brilliant economics professor to reclaim a forgotten part of her past, are all linked together by an intriguing painting with an extraordinary history. Provenance chronicles the painting’s incredible journey over four centuries and two continents, as viewed from the perspectives of those individuals into whose lives the painting entered and forever changed. The book focuses on three critical and defining events in the painting’s history: the creation of the painting by the Dutch master Rembrandt and his young Jewish apprentice in 1641; the confiscation of the painting by the Nazis in 1942 and its mysterious disappearance; and the unexpected discovery of the painting in 1990 by the surviving daughter of its previous owner and her ensuing attempts to recover it. The result is a fast-paced and absorbing account of familial devotion, personal sacrifice, and enduring love that transcends time.