Professor Butter Beard and “Rembrandt in a Red Beret”
“He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn't someone once said that fezzes were cool? And they were. They were cool.”
― Derek Landy, “Kingdom of the Wicked”
I love hats. I absolutely do. My baseball caps love to dance with my overalls. My summer straws are cool on beach walks with Nellie and deep thought protecting while directing outdoor Shakespeare. My flat caps enhance my Scottish mindset. And my black pork-pie and caramel bowler twinkle with some serious attitude. But when it comes to berets, I must relinquish my chapeau crown to Rembrandt. That talented dude owns the beret with style and swag.
Rembrandt and one of his deep red berets are currently a delicious topic of conversation within the art world. According to Nina Siegal, journalist for the New York Times, in 1934, a plumber from Dayton, Ohio, took a weekend trip to New York City and got drunk with some German sailors. When he awoke in the morning, his money was gone, but there were three rolled-up old paintings in his hotel room. On closer inspection, he realized that one of them looked curiously like a Rembrandt.
Cloudy about the details of the night before, the plumber, Leo Ernst, returned home to Dayton, hid the paintings, and tried to forget the entire episode. A few years later, however, his new wife, Anna Cunningham, stumbled upon the artworks in a closet, and asked Ernst what they were. “Just some old junk” he got in a scam, he told her.
Siegal states that this is one version of Ernst’s story, possibly fabricated, recounted in a new book by the art historian Gary Schwartz, and just one of the twists and turns in the 200-year saga of one of those three paintings, “Rembrandt in a Red Beret.”
Research has revealed that the painting was first recorded in the collection of the 19th century King Willem II of the Netherlands, and then passed down through royal hands to a German grand duke in the early 20th century. Art historians agree that is undeniably an image of the 17th-century master, but scholars have disagreed about whether the painting is a self-portrait; a portrait by one of Rembrandt’s star pupils, perhaps Ferdinand Bol; or a 19th-century imitation.
“It was accepted unconditionally as a Rembrandt from 1823 to 1969,” Schwartz said in a recent interview. “It’s a canonical image, and no one else painted those kinds of images. I simply don’t see why it would be doubted.”
But back to our story….. In 1945, Anna Cunningham decided she could no longer keep her husband’s hidden paintings a secret and took “Rembrandt in a Red Beret” to the Dayton Art Institute to show it to the museum’s director, Siegfried Weng. He asked to hold onto them for research and wrote a letter to Francis Henry Taylor, then the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
“Before me on my desk, I believe, is the much-damaged canvas of the Weimar Museum’s Rembrandt self-portrait,” Taylor responded. World War II had only recently ended, and Taylor suspected that the painting might have been among artworks uprooted during the war. He counseled Weng to send the piece to Charles Henry Sawyer, the head of the Art Looting Investigation Unit in Washington, one of the “Monuments Men.”
“Rembrandt in a Red Beret” remained in legal limbo for decades, in the care of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It was studied, described as “very badly damaged,” and partly restored. This month, the painting is finally being displayed in public for the first time in more than a half a century, at Escher in Het Paleis, a former royal palace in the Hague.
Gary Schwartz believes that part of the reason people may not see it as a genuine Rembrandt is that it is so badly damaged. “It’s my damaged Rembrandt,” he said. “Because there’s so much missing and it has been painted over, it makes the wrong impression when you see it for the first time,” he said.
Schwartz is genuinely pleased that other scholars at least now have a chance to see the work, read his arguments, and decide for themselves. “It was just astonishing to find all of the detailed information about the painting,” he said. “The question of authenticity was secondary to the story.”
All these thoughts of charming chapeaus inspired me in my kitchen this week. The weather has been bone-chilling cold, and nothing warms my soul on a crisp winter morning like a steaming cup of joe alongside a slice of a still-warm coffee cake wearing a bowler hat of crispy crumble. I put my own spin on an existing recipe for a chocolate espresso cake by adding brown sugar, hazelnut extract and roasted nuts. Go ahead and cut a slice while it is still warm. Take a sip of your joe and decide which hat best matches your attitude today.
Chocolate Expresso Coffee Cake
One 10” round cake (use a springform pan)
Espresso Crumble:
½ cup toasted hazelnuts, coarsely chopped
½ cup all-purpose flour
6 Tbsp dark brown sugar
1 Tbsp instant espresso powder
½ tsp fine sea salt
4 Tbsp cold unsalted butter, cut into very small cubes
Coffee Cake:
3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped, melted and slightly cooled
3 Tbsp instant espresso powder
20 Tbsp (2 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 ½ cups granulated sugar
5 large eggs, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla paste
2 tsp hazelnut extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup Greek yogurt
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 10” springform pan and line with parchment paper.
2) For the crumb: Toast, cool and coarsely chop the hazelnuts. Whisk together the flour, brown sugar, espresso powder and salt. Add the hazelnuts and cubed butter. Use your fingers to work the mixture into a mixture resembling wet sand. Chill until ready to use.
3) Melt the 3 ounces dark chocolate and stir in the espresso powder. Set aside.
4) In a standing mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla paste and hazelnut extract and mix to combine.
5) Whisk together the flour, salt and cinnamon. On low speed, add the flour and yogurt, alternating flour, yogurt, flour, yogurt and remaining flour. Divide the batter equally in half and fold the chocolate/espresso into one half.
6) Scoop, or spoon, the batter into the prepared pan. Alternate between the two batters. After all the batter is in the pan, use a butter knife to swirl the two batters. Top with the chilled crumble and bake for 70 to 75 minutes until a wooden skewer comes out clean.
7) Cool on a wire rack for thirty minutes. Release the springform and serve warm cut into generous slices.
