Refugee Rembrandt

Cinemactor Thomas Mitchell, who last month won an Oscar for playing the best supporting role (in Stagecoach) of 1939, makes good pictures. He buys still better ones. The library of his Riviera (near Hollywood) home has a special niche over the mantel. It is the shrine where Tom Mitchell hangs his latest purchases. In it have hung successively a Rouault Christ, a Whistler view of the Thames, a Modigliani woman with red hair, an Utrillo landscape, an oil sketch of a screaming woman from Picasso's Guernica. Last week it was the Picasso's turn to move out. Tom Mitchell had a Rembrandt.

The new Mitchell prize appears in no Rembrandt catalogue. A refugee Polish prince brought it to the U. S. this winter. The prince took his small (10 by 12 in.) painting of the head of a bearded man to Manhattan's Silberman Galleries. There Dr. Wilhelm R. Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and top U. S. authority on Dutch painting, promptly identified it as a Rembrandt, a study for the head of Christ in The Supper at Emmaus, one of the Louvre's masterpieces.

Dealer David Silberman showed Cinemactor Mitchell the Christ along with some modern paintings (Mitchell hitherto had bought only moderns). His eye hit the Rembrandt and stayed there. "I saw something in that Christ's face I hadn't seen before," said he. "It wasn't an emaciated, lifeless symbol of a man. It was a human, bewildered Christ. This Christ was real flesh and blood and soul." For that flesh and blood and soul Tom Mitchell plunked down about $45,000.

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