Storied Rembrandt to Be Shown at the Getty

Years later, Myles Connor, a flamboyant career art thief, claimed that he had engineered the robbery and return to avoid prison time in another art theft case. In a 1998 interview with Forrest Sawyer of ABC, Mr. Connor, who has served many years in prison, was asked if the theft was his idea. “From the beginning,” he said. “And it went off like clockwork.”

The Getty has four Rembrandt paintings in its permanent collection, and the work on loan will be exhibited near “The Abduction of Europa,” also from 1632. “Portrait of a Girl,” once believed to be a rendering of Rembrandt’s sister, inspired the facial types of many of Rembrandt’s heroines in the early 1630s, including the princess and her attendant seen in profile in “The Abduction of Europa,” the museum said.

The sitter in the portrait is shown in the type of costume Rembrandt favored for biblical and mythological paintings, and he scratched in the paint to create the pleats of her white shirt.

The work, which was once owned by Prince Johannes II of Lichtenstein, was bought by Robert Treat Paine II in 1929 for $125,000 and was displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts. After being returned in 1976, it went back on view at the museum, and mostly remained there until 1986. Shortly after the Rembrandt Research Project in Amsterdam reaffirmed its authenticity, the Paine heirs decided to auction it before a sharp increase in the capital gains tax took effect in 1987.

Anne Woollett, the Getty’s associate curator of paintings, said the museum hoped the loan would bring attention to Southern California’s substantial public holdings of Rembrandt, second in number only to New York and Washington.

“When you consider both Los Angeles and San Diego, there are 13 paintings by Rembrandt on public view,” Ms. Woollett said. “For such relatively young collecting institutions, that’s a major accomplishment.”