It’s the kind of moment an art dealer lives for: the discovery of a rare work nestled in an otherwise average assortment of auction lots. It’s even rarer to discover a massively underrated drawing by a Dutch master that hadn’t been spotted for 132 years. This is exactly the backstory of how Christopher Bishop got his hands on a drawing by 17th century painter Jan Lievens from a small auction house in Massachusetts in 2020, where it was originally valued between 200 and $300. By the end of this month, it could fetch around $1.44 million in Lievens’ home country of the Netherlands.

The work is a formal portrait of Maarten Tromp, the commander of the Dutch navy, who sat for the artist just a year before his death in a naval battle with the English. In the centuries that followed, Tromp was an icon of national pride in the Netherlands, even appearing on Dutch postage stamps when 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 design has been an interesting one. First used as the basis for Tromp’s oil paintings, the drawing has served as the basis for printed reproductions, as it shows evidence of having been pinned to an etching plate. The ownership of this particular drawing was last shown at an 1888 auction in Frankfurt, with its whereabouts between that date and 2020 entirely unknown.

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

Bishop knew that a J often looked like a I in the seventeenth century signatures gave him the intuition that he was onto something special. This suspicion was quickly confirmed by renewed interest in the run-up to the October 2020 auction. 100% of having purchased an authentic work when the hammer struck.