Thomas Kaplan


Thomas Scott Kaplan is a Franco-American businessman, philanthropist and art collector. He is the world's largest private collector of Rembrandt's works.
Kaplan is the chairman and chief investment officer of The Electrum Group LLC, a New York City-based investment, advisory and asset management firm with a focus on the natural resources sector. Since 2017, he has been the chairman of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, a Geneva-based foundation established by France and the United Arab Emirates.

Early life and education

Born in New York City, Kaplan is the son of Lillian Jean Kaplan and Jason "Jay" Kaplan. He and his family are Jewish.
In his youth, Kaplan developed a passion for wildlife conservation and for Rembrandt, which later inspired him to found the field conservation group Panthera and The Leiden Collection, the world's largest private grouping of works from the Dutch Golden Age.
At Oxford University, Kaplan earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in history. Under the supervision of Sir Michael Howard, then Regius Professor of History, and Chichele Professor of War Robert O’Neill, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Malayan counterinsurgency and the manner in which commodities influence strategic planning. While earning his Ph.D., Kaplan worked as an analyst covering Israeli companies publicly traded in the U.S. On a business trip, he met his future wife, Dafna Recanati, who had attended the same Swiss boarding school as Kaplan, Institut Le Rosey. Her mother, artist Mira Recanati, introduced him to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, who hired him as a junior partner in 1991. Kaplan had impressed Tiomkin by correctly predicting Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait several years before it took place. When Tiomkin decided to concentrate his investments solely in Israel in 1993, Kaplan moved on to pursue his own entrepreneurial ventures.

Career

Inspired by Marc Faber, who held that precious metals were insurance against the "monetary foolishness" of central governments, Kaplan focused on natural resources investing. In 1993, he founded Apex Silver Mines to capitalize on the improving supply/demand fundamentals of metals. While he was chairman and chief executive officer of Apex, his team discovered and financed the mining of the San Cristobal deposit in Bolivia. Kaplan retired from Apex Silver at the end of 2004.
In 2003, a company related to Kaplan became the largest investor in African Platinum Plc. In 2007, Kaplan sold his position in African Platinum as part of a transaction in which the company was acquired by Impala Platinum Limited, at a valuation of $580 million.
Also in 2003, Kaplan founded Leor Exploration & Production LLC, which became the fastest-growing privately held hydrocarbon exploration and production company in the United States. In 2007, Leor's natural gas assets were sold to Encana for $2.55 billion.
Kaplan first began investing heavily in gold in 2000. Since the sales of African Platinum and Leor in 2007, Kaplan has focused on the Electrum Group. Its exploration arm, Electrum Ltd., which he co-founded with Dr. Larry Buchanan, owns gold exploration assets. Its other entities hold interests in several publicly traded companies, including NovaGold Resources and Gabriel Resources Ltd., two companies that own gold resources. Among its private interests, the Electrum Group is the controlling shareholder of Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining Corporation, which owns the Sunshine Mine in Idaho, a large silver mine in U.S. history, as well as the Los Gatos silver-zinc deposit in Mexico, which it is developing in partnership with Dowa of Japan. Gatos Silver went public in October 2020, raising $170 million.
In the spring of 2009, Kaplan was quoted as saying "I can find no better time than now to recommend its purchase to others. Some will say that US$800 gold seems expensive. I would suggest the contrary: that a few years from now, sub-$1,000 gold will feel like a true gift."
In August 2020, it was reported that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway had made an investment in Barrick Gold, NOVAGOLD's joint venture partner in the Donlin Gold mine project in Alaska. This prompted Kaplan to recall the positive impact of Buffett's purchase of silver bullion at the time he was taking his silver mining company public in 1997. Beginning in 2010, Kaplan began accumulating silver mining assets and waited for long-stagnant prices to rebound.
Kaplan says his "mantra" is to "go for the great assets that give you tremendous underlying leverage to your theme... but only in jurisdictions that will allow you to keep the fruits of the leverage." Analysts have referred to his highlighting the importance of jurisdictional risks in the mining industry as the "Kaplan Doctrine".

Leiden Collection

Kaplan's passion for the Dutch art began in his childhood. Kaplan and his wife, Dafna Recanati Kaplan, began to collect the art of the Dutch Golden Age in 2003. In that year, they acquired their first Dutch painting: Gerrit Dou's Portrait of Dirck van Beresteyn. The Leiden Collection, named after the Dutch town of Leiden where Rembrandt and Dou were born, is among the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world, with more than 250 paintings and drawings, most of which are included in a free, high-resolution online catalogue. The Kaplans' intention was to establish a "lending library for old masters", including loans for special exhibitions as well as loans to bolster long-term installations. The collection, which includes Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes and Minerva in Her Study, was featured in a three-part documentary entitled "Looking for Rembrandt" that aired on the BBC in April 2019 on the 350th anniversary of the Rembrandt's death. Minerva in her Study and Bust of a Bearded Man were among 35 pictures lent to the Hermitage Amsterdam for an exhibition of Leiden Collection works in early 2023.
The Leiden Collection focuses on Rembrandt and his school. It includes a group of fifteen paintings and two drawings by Rembrandt and members of his circle including his teacher, Pieter Lastman, and Jan Lievens. The collection also includes a 1629-1630 self-portrait of Lievens. The collection contains 250 paintings and drawings, mainly by 17th-century artists based in Leiden including: thirteen paintings from all phases of the career of Gerrit Dou, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals by Johannes Vermeer and Hagar and the Angel by Carel Fabritius. A catalog of the Dou works in the collection, with technical analyses, appeared in 2014. An online catalog of the collection was published in January 2017, with information on over 175 of the works in the collection.

''The Five Senses'' by Rembrandt van Rijn

At a 2015 auction in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a European bidder bought The Fainting Patient or Smell for $870,000, though its pre-auction estimate had only been $800. This was identified as an early work by Rembrandt, dating to 1624 and belonging to his The Five Senses series. Soon after, the Leiden Collection acquired the work for $5 million. The Leiden Collection owned Hearing and Touch from the series.
Smell bears Rembrandt's monogram, representing the master's earliest known signature, and is similar in dimensions and style to the other known works in the series. The three Leiden Collection works were exhibited at the Getty Museum in 2016, and the complete extant set of four were reunited for shows at the Ashmolean Museum and Rembrandthuis in 2017.

Exhibitions

Notable past and upcoming exhibitions of the Leiden Collection include:

Foreign policy

Kaplan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He belongs to the International Council of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, where Kaplan, scholar Graham Allison and American General David Petraeus created the Recanati–Kaplan Foundation Fellows Program for intelligence officers from around the globe. A similar program was established in 2020 at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, the Petraeus-Recanati-Kaplan Fellowship, which brings select special military operators to Yale University for a one-year global affairs master's. In 2022, the Recanati-Kaplan Applied History Initiative was created at the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum, a think-tank based at the University of Cambridge, "to inform Middle East policy with deep historical insight".
In 2018, along with French philosopher and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kaplan co-founded Justice for Kurds, a New York-based, not-for-profit advocacy group that seeks to educate and raise public awareness about the Kurdish cause in the U.S. and globally. Kaplan serves as chairman of the group. JFK's Advisory Council features policymakers, journalists, intellectuals, diplomats, military commanders, and artists.
While an affirmed “Persophile” who often and publicly recalls the merits of Iran's civilization, Kaplan is regularly targeted by official Iranian media for his opposition to the regime. Along with Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Kaplan contributed three-quarters of the 1.7 million dollar revenue of United Against Nuclear Iran in 2013. The following year, Kaplan was drawn into a defamation case in which UANI was sued by a Greek businessman whom the group claimed was doing business with Iran. The civil suit was later dismissed after the intervention of the Obama Administration which claimed “that the case could jeopardize U.S. national security by revealing state secrets.”
In 2017 Kaplan gave a speech at a UANI conference in which he compared Iran's activities in Iraq to a reticulated python devouring a goat as well as saying that the Iranian government because of their Shiite Muslim beliefs "pursue a strategy of 'taqiyya', or religious dissimulation" to conceal its imperial aims. In response to the speech, in October 2017, the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a conservation organization based in Iran, severed ties with the Kaplan-founded NGO, Panthera. In a letter to Panthera PWHF said, “His allegations about our country are absolutely baseless and his statements are insulting to our country and its people,” the letter continued. “We are very sorry to see personal politics have a negative impact on conservation, but these are unusual times.” The activists ended up getting arrested by the Iranian government under charges of treason, though they have maintained their innocence since.