"Peter Jacob Horemans" (1700-1776) turns out to be by Anthonie Victorijns or even Job. Berckheyde!

Arte Roma, from, well, Rome, sells on 2 March 2016 a "Peter Jacob Horemans" interior with violist with pipe and woman with newspaper, signed lower right and estimated at 900 to 1,200 Euro.

The problem is that the signature at the lower right is not of Horemans (Peter Jacob or another one), but of A. Victorijns. I guess the auctioneer (or owner) saw "...or...ns" and took the most likely Flemish painter which fitted this, Horemans. Not a ridiculous thing to do, deciphering signatures is often a case of "fill in the blanks", but here it is obviously wrong.

The signature clearly reads A. Victoryns, short for Anthonie Victorijns (change the contrast to get a better view if needed).  The RKD has a good explanation (in Dutch) about Victorijns and the problems with attributing paintings to him. This means that either this is a very important discovery in the study of the work of Victorijns, or that the signature is fake.

To complicate things further, there exists another version of this work, by Job. Berckheyde (found on the RKD).  Berckheyde was active from 1653 on, and Victorijns died in 1655, so there is a very small window where Victorijns may have copied the work by Berckheyde (Victorijns is so far known as a copier, not so much an original artist).

Other possibilities are that both Victorijns and Berckheyde copied the same work, or that one of the two doesn't have the correct attribution. In that case, it is most likely that the Victorijns signature is fake and that it is by someone else. Berckheyde himself?

I like the work a lot, some others I briefly contacted about it are less enthusiastic, so it may simply be a copy with an added signature, which was then misread by the auctioneer. To me it looks as good as the Berckheyde, but that may be due to the size of the two images of course.

But it may be wise to keep in mind that in 1989, Sotheby's sold a Berckheyde of the same dimensions with the title "Interior with man smoking clay pipe, woman reading paper and musician" for £125,000 (but I haven't found an image of that painting yet).

This one should in any case be worth more than the estimate, and could be a sleeper.

UPDATE: another version of this work is for sale at Doyle, USA, on 24 May 2017 with an estimate of $5,000 to $8,000. It is signed by Berckheyde, and looks good, so this seems reasonably cheap. This may well be the same version as the RKD one shown above.