Until last month, a quiet surprise was tucked into the dimly lit rotunda of the Morehead Planetarium on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Among a circle of portraits in the small and little-known gallery was the painting of a young 17th-century woman identified as Rembrandt's sister, Liesbeth van Rijn, poised as if in the very shadows of the room. Despite its subdued colors and plain subject, the portrait seemed like an exciting part of the collection: the only Rembrandt painting known to exist in North Carolina. If it were truly a Rembrandt. But it wasn't.

In June a university employee removed the placard that read "Rembrandt van Rijn" and replaced it with one saying the portrait had more likely been painted by Isack Jouderville, an apprentice from the master's workshop in Amsterdam.

Reattributions have happened quietly, without fanfare, hundreds of times over the past few decades in museums across the country. The Morehead's might have been just one more unnoticed downgrade had the plate been changed 20 years ago when a team of experts first concluded that the painting wasn't a Rembrandt after all.

But it's hard to let the masters slip through your fingers.

N.C. Museum of Art curator Dennis Weller knows that sinking feeling. He was an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1993 when two supposed Rembrandts in the collection were reattributed. NCMA has seen 10 paintings that it had purchased as Rembrandts or Rubenses reattributed to lesser hands.

"Some of those stars have dimmed," said Weller, whose specialty is northern European art.

The upheaval has been the result of an ongoing reappraisal of works once thought to be by those artists. Now, in the 400th anniversary year of Rembrandt's birth, about half of what he was once thought to have painted has been credited to his students and other artists -- about 200 paintings in all.

Recent research casts an increasingly skeptical eye on the few experts who attributed so many paintings to Rembrandt and Rubens around the turn of the last century. Some of their scholarship is considered outdated or even suspect because they were paid for their opinions.

One of those experts was the North Carolina art museum's first director, the late Wilhelm R. Valentiner, who helped stock its initial collection, drawn from the artists of that era. Valentiner, working under very different standards and without today's technology, was at the center of a series of mistaken identifications that have disrupted collections around the world, including in the Triangle. Two recent publications have questioned his motives.

"It's just the nature of the beast," Weller said. "Thankfully, otherwise art historians would have nothing to do 300 or 400 years later sorting it all out."

Masters had their factories

It's baffling to think that history could so carelessly lose track of what Rembrandt and Rubens, or van Dyck and Vermeer, painted themselves or left to their pupils. But the golden age of Dutch and Flemish masters is closer than you might think to Andy Warhol's Factory and Thomas Kinkade, the mall outlet mass-marketer.

When Peter Paul Rubens, the star of the early to mid-17th century, was commissioned to paint, contracts spelled out whether he would be the primary painter or would merely touch up the piece after his best pupil or other students did most of the work. At the least, Rubens typically did an oil sketch and spelled out the composition and sometimes the colors, and someone in his studio would work it up to scale, Weller said. Or someone in the studio designed it and Rubens did the painting. He employed specialists in still-life, landscapes and other forms.

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