Bredius, Abraham

Bredius, Abraham (1855–1946). Dutch art historian and collector. Bredius excelled at archival research and published a large amount of new documentation relating to 17th-century Dutch artists. His best-known work is his complete illustrated catalogue of Rembrandt's paintings, originally published in German in 1935 and then in an English edition in 1937; a second English edition, revised by Horst Gerson, Bredius's collaborator on the original edition, appeared in 1969. It is still a standard work (although the illustrations are of poor quality) and the Bredius numbering system is widely used in Rembrandt scholarship. Bredius made a choice collection of Dutch paintings; he presented or bequeathed many to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague (of which he was director from 1889 to 1909) and others are in the Bredius Museum in The Hague. His reputation as a connoisseur was blighted because he was taken in by the work of the Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren (1880–1947); however, Bredius was very old at the time (1937) and almost all his contemporaries were similarly deceived.