The Duke of Buccleuch, the long-time biggest landowner in all of Scotland (before being toppled by Danish tycoon and rewilding pioneer, Anders Holch Povlsen) has an impressive art collection, even featuring a treasured Rembrandt.
In August 2003, the Duke’s Leonardo da Vinci painting, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, was stolen by paying visitors to Drumlanrig Castle, the Duke’s seat in Dumfries and Galloway. The painting was positioned directly alongside his Rembrandt, An Old Woman Reading. The heist jolted the family into recurating the home – and putting the Rembrandt out of harm's way, and therefore, most sadly, out of sight. For years, its isolation (placed 12ft high on a wall in the upper reaches of the castle) was a cause of ‘great sadness’ for the Duke, ‘because you really can’t see and enjoy her’.
Now a documentary, My Rembrandt (available on general release now), explores the paranoia in the Buccleuch family following the theft. In the programme, which looks at art collectors whose interests in Rembrandt have taken on faintly obsessive dimensions, the Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk shows the Duke allowing Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to bring the portrait down from its lofty perch on a little visited upper floor to a slightly more accessible point in the castle (where it can be better enjoyed). ‘It is too high up and the intimacy it has now is lost,’ Taco Dibbits, the director general of the Rijksmuseum, tells the Duke. The chosen new room is a charming reading room (still only accessible through a secret doorway). The series is all Dutch accents, titillating Rembrandt close-ups and the electric voices of frenzied collectors (‘I completely relate to the obsession,’ one says peering into a transparent protective cube, home to a tiny Rembrandt).
The Duke tells Dibbits: ‘My father was so shaken by what happened [the theft] that he decided that she should instead hang high up on a higher floor. But it is a great sadness because you can’t really see and enjoy her.’ In the documentary, the Duke talks about her as if she were alive (‘she is the most powerful presence in this house,’ he says at one point).
Four years after the theft, Madonna of the Yarnwinder (valued at £4.25 million) was recovered when police raided the offices of a law firm in Glasgow. The ninth duke (the father of the current) had died aged 83 a month earlier, so sadly never got to be reunited with his beloved painting. It has been on loan to National Galleries of Scotland since, where security arrangements ensure it can be enjoyed at eye level.
Watch the My Rembrandt trailer here:
