Transcript
Etchings by Rembrandt

In a recent online event, NGV curators Cathy Leahy and Petra Kayser introduced a number of etchings by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn newly donated to the Collection by Bridgestar Pty Ltd from the collection of James O Fairfax AC. In this exclusive online edition of NGV Magazine’s Transcript, read an edited extract of their discussion.

Self-portrait leaning on a stone 1639
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Petra Kayser: Rembrandt made more self-portraits than any other artist of his generation. More than eighty of these have survived – at least one for each year of his long artistic career. In his earliest self-portraits, Rembrandt studied moods and facial expressions, in later examples he presented himself in various poses and attire. When Rembrandt made this self-portrait in 1639, he was an established and highly successful artist. In 1630 Rembrandt had moved from Leiden to Amsterdam, where he lived at the house of the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, whose niece Saskia he later married. Uylenburgh brokered painting commissions which helped Rembrandt establish his reputation as a leading artist with a distinctive style.

In seventeenth-century Holland, artists like Rembrandt were working not only for individual patrons, but for the open market. There was a class of merchants and professional citizens, including doctors, lawyers and preachers, who were collectors of art. Rembrandt was a great collector of art himself, and around this time he was beginning to assemble a great collection of paintings, prints, antiquities and natural curiosities such as shells and animal skeletons. In 1639 he bought a house, which you could describe as a mansion, in a very fashionable street in Amsterdam. The house had a reception room on the ground floor where he would meet clients, a large room dedicated to displaying his collection, and the entire top floor was a workshop and studio. It was his own studio, and also provided ample room for students and assistants who each had their own area to work in.

This self-portrait was made in the year in which Rembrandt moved into the house. He was by now Amsterdam’s most fashionable portrait painter. Rembrandt often made portraits of sitters in elaborate or oriental dress, and here he depicts himself in a voluminous coat and a beret. He is leaning on a stone sill in a pose copied from a Titian painting, and his face is modelled on a portrait by Raphael. By referencing these artists, he pays homage to the Italian painters, and at the same time positions himself in lineage with the great Renaissance masters.

Landscape with cottage and haybarn 1641
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Cathy Leahy: Landscape with cottage and haybarn, 1641, is one of the landscape etchings in the group of seven prints by Rembrandt from the Fairfax collection. Landscape was a major subject in Rembrandt’s prints and drawings (although not in his paintings), and he produced landscapes at several different periods in his career. The first of his landscape etchings date from between 1641 and 1645 and this work is one of the earliest of that group. These etchings show the waterways and countryside around Amsterdam which we know Rembrandt walked extensively, observing particular locations and drawing on the spot. However, when it came to making his etchings, he moved things around to suit his own artistic ends and combined elements, producing composite views. This print is a wonderful example of that very practice. In the centre is a prominent and rustic farmhouse with a thatched roof topped with peat moss. There is a little cart nestled in beside the house, and the whole structure is set against a very low horizon. In the far distance on the left is a distant view of Amsterdam where we can see the city’s church spires, however on the right is a river scene with a house. Rembrandt often drew this particular manor house on the Amstel river; it appears in quite a lot of his drawings and prints. So, what we see here is how Rembrandt has combined these disparate elements to create the one composition.

Beggars receiving alms at the door of a house 1648
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Petra Kayser: This print from 1648, also from the Fairfax collection, is one of Rembrandt’s images of beggars. The earliest of these were small-scale prints of solitary figures with a blank background. In this mature work Rembrandt developed the motif of the beggar into a genre scene. It is a complex composition in which all of the figures are linked in the moment when a man donates a coin to a family of beggars. The background on the right is blank, which gives prominence to the group of figures. In addition to the naturalistic detail, there is a symbolic element in the composition. The gutter at the bottom left and the door mark the division between the rich man in the house and the family on the right, but the entire composition is focused on the connection of the hands. The areas of light and dark around the hand of the almsgiver in the house draws attention to the act of charity that is the subject of this print.

Christ with the sick around Him (The hundred guilder print) c. 1648
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Cathy Leahy: The hundred guilder print, c. 1648, is recognised as one of Rembrandt’s most complex and important religious prints and this fine impression of it was purchased for the NGV Collection in 1891. It was also one of the artist’s most popular prints, as the ‘hundred guilder’ in the title refers to the high price that Rembrandt paid in the seventeenth century to buy back an impression of it. This tells us that there was already a strong market for Rembrandt’s etchings in his own lifetime. The hundred guilder print combines various episodes from chapter nineteen in the Gospel of Matthew – including Christ healing the sick and welcoming children, and the disputation amongst the Pharisees. There are more than forty figures in the print, revealing Rembrandt’s great skill in conveying meaning through the different gestures, poses and expressions they each display. On the left is the young man who ponders Christ’s advice that he must give away all of his possessions to obtain salvation. Further to the left, the Pharisees are shown with different expressions on their faces as they debate amongst themselves, and to the right of Christ the various sick are being brought through to see him. This complex composition is unified by an extraordinary chiaroscuro (play of light and shade) that suffuses the etching and binds the disparate groups into a coherent whole. Rembrandt achieved this by using a complex technique that combines etching, drypoint and burin. He first laid down a finely etched ground that sets a half-tone and then worked back into this with the burin and the drypoint needle to get deep shadows and lighter highlights. In a way Rembrandt was bringing into his printmaking the same kind of advances that he’d made in his painting technique a few years earlier where he introduced a tinted ground which acted as the middle ground. So, what we see with this print is a work that competes both in its pictorial and tonal qualities with painting.

Jan Lutma, goldsmith 1656
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Cathy Leahy: This print, which has come to the NGV as part of the recent donation, is one of the group of great, late portraits that Rembrandt made of friends or close contacts between 1655 and 1658. Jan Lutma, who is the subject of this print, was a famous gold and silver smith in Amsterdam. He is shown here with the tools of his profession; a figure he has made in his hand, and a hammer and gold working tools on the table on the right. In these late portrait prints, Rembrandt set his sitters in interiors in which there is an extraordinary play of light and shade that is emphasised by the heavy inking and selective wiping of the plate. And Rembrandt also varied these effects through his use of different types of paper; here the heavy oatmeal paper adds real warmth to the print. We also see an enigmatic half smile on the goldsmith’s face. This is typical of Rembrandt’s late portraits, which have a very strong focus on the psychological presence of the sitters. This print was made in 1656 around the time Rembrandt succumbed to bankruptcy. It has been suggested in the literature that Rembrandt would turn to portraiture commissions at times of financial hardship.

This is an edited extract of an online event that took place on 22 September 2020. Cathy Leahy is NGV Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Petra Kayser is NGV Curator, Prints and Drawings.