The “Most Bizarre Manner”: Rembrandt’s Etchings

you you good afternoon Rembrandt made himself famous throughout Europe not with his paintings but with his etchings 20 years after his death of the Florentine Filippo bel DiNucci writing about the art of engraving mentioned Rembrandt's printmaking technique as a nun quoting him now the most bizarre manner which he invented for engraving on copper with acid a method that was all his own neither used by others nor seen again Rembrandt used certain scrolls and scribbles and irregular strokes without outlines as bald anoche and he created a deep chiaroscuro he means contrast of light and dark of great vigor and picturesque flavor what struck contemporaries as bizarre was the variety of lines from loose and quick like here on the left in the landscape to methodically cross-hatched in the half-light to deep and dark and blah t Rembrandt didn't invent edging though bal DiNucci was ready to give him credit but he did push its potential for describing the world in black and white farther than anyone ever had today we're gonna look at how he did that to begin with I want us just to examine one picture I'll return to the subject of the so-called hundred gilded print but right now I simply want you to look at it look at the whole thing and look at some details I'll show you without my making any comments where you see right away what and who is important and you're given a you're given a lot of cues Christ is highest the apex of the triangle of figures and he's silhouetted against the dark nish lipe shake and almost everybody is looking toward him there are about three dozen people here and there is a great deal going on but we're able to make some sense of it because important individuals are picked out of the crowd by being given more detail and more space and more contrast others are sketched more lightly and they're clustered in groups like the Pharisees at the left debating what Christ is saying and the darkness at the far right is the product of closely spaced edged lines that are reinforced by the lines that struck Bal DiNucci as bizarre deep dark lines created by drypoint not etched at all but gouged directly into the plate and displacing copper to the sides of the grooves forming what printmakers called burr an ink in that copper Brewer makes extra dark lines we're going to come back to this print which you can examine for yourselves in the original up in the galleries but first I'm going to show you a four-minute video clip made by the Philadelphia Museum of Art that demonstrates these techniques of etching and dry point and also Rembrandt's practice of leaving some ink on the plate not just in the grooves for both techniques a copper metal plate is cleaned and the edges are beveled to make an etching the plate is evenly covered with an acid resistant coating made from asphaltum and beeswax this is known as the ground the artist uses an etching needle to draw on the ground and this exposes the metal below the plate is then immersed in an acid bath the acid eats away at the exposed metal creating the lines or grooves in the plate dry point is a simple technique that involves using a sharp needle to draw directly into a metal plate creating a burr a thin Ridge of metal that catches the ink during printing dry point was the mysterious technique Rembrandt's critics referred to for both techniques the plate is then covered with ink which is especially pushed into those grooves the surface is then gently wiped clean with a soft cloth to remove most of the ink from the surface Rembrandt frequently used selectively wiping of the plate to create dramatic atmospheric effects in his etchings by leaving an ink film of varied density and in different areas of the plate he was able to create a range of tonal effects much like those seen in his paintings and drawings once the ink is wiped the plate is placed on the press bed and covered with damp printing paper buffer paper and layers of blankets the press bed is slowly rotated between two metal rollers exerting pressure this causes the damp paper to press into the inked grooves of the copper plate the paper is taken off the press and the print is made the drypoint scratches create a softer effect more like a brushstroke with the ink being heavier on one side of the line and softer on the other in his hundred Gilder print Rembrandt dramatically varied the way he wiped the ink each time he printed it producing almost 100 unique versions of this one image the hundred Gilder print is one of the artists most powerful works of art and a masterpiece of printing well century earlier I'll brush Durer investigated itching there are five etchings by juror in addition to hundreds of engravings and wood cuts itching was a less laborious way of cutting grooves into a copper plate than engraving but dura didn't keep it up and graved lines have the advantage of varying and width swelling and thinning edged lines are uniform but they do let the artists use a looser and freer kind of drawing on the plate comparable to pen drawing Dewart just didn't care to take advantage of that Parma Jenny knows edgings around the same time begin to behave like drawings not exactly spontaneous but looser than engraving edging really got its own identity in the Netherlands while Rembrandt was young prints like this small landscape at the bottom by esaias from Laval de would have suggested to remember at how he could translate his own pen lines into slightly more schematic edged lines that way little drawings with familiar scenery like the one at the top could be printed and issued as multiples like the one at the bottom and sold cheaply another possibility attracted him at the same time suggested by this great original mind hercules say hers that you might make one-off prints one-of-a-kind by etching a plate differently in subsequent examples by by adding drypoint lines by using colored inks and even by adding watercolor to the printed sheets from Rembrandt's inventory we know that he owned pictures by say her is probably to study and also to sell because of his side line was an activity as an art dealer from sakers Rembrandt absorbed landscape ideas but also his business model for prints each impression from the plate can differ from the last and because of its rarity be more valuable as a result and that must have appealed both to Rembrandt's experimental and has come instincts by the way the first large exhibition of hercules say hers is at the rax museum now and it's coming to the metropolitan in february you don't want to miss that we looked in the last lecture at Rembrandt's ambitious experiments in painting during the later 20s and early 30s his etchings also show him trying out new kinds of expressive techniques and doing it with kind of restless energy he took unconventional and in gun conventional interest in himself as a subject in drawings and paintings and in tiny edgings the one that the top here is just an inch and a half square edging technique which he had barely learned he had a flair for facial expression as we've been seeing in these lectures and with these little pictures he built up an inventory of emotional states that could serve as models for his narrative scenes he was becoming one of the most expressive draftsman in history in this drawing here down in the middle of an old man bent forward to hear a crippled Gila he conveys the man's age and also the volume of his body and cloak he used the drawing for a scene in the acts of apostles where Peter and John meet a crippled beggar at the gate of the temple at the right and Peter heals him he used this little self-portrait actually for John at the far right who's got Rembrandt's wooly hair he seems to have been experimenting with different acids so in this edging the lines are comparatively crudely etched and the contrasts are very strong Rembrandt had a phase of experimenting with large prints reproducing history paintings as Rubens had been doing very profitably and the first of these was based on a spectacular painting of a subject that's always appealed to artists for its high drama the raising of Lazarus which you saw in the first lecture two sisters Martha and Mary have a brother Xero's who's sick and they asked Christ to come and heal him but he doesn't come right away and Lazarus dies after Christ arrives late he says he'll rise resurrect him everybody doubts it there's already a bad smell in the tomb but Christ does it it's a test of his followers faith and a prefiguration of what soon happens to Christ himself so Rembrandt sets the scene in a cave that's hung with a Dead Man's armor and lifts by a mysterious source from the left Christ speaks the words Lazarus come out and Lazarus does Rembrandt labored over the composition and in the meantime his rival and sometimes studio mate from Leiden young Levin's painted the subject and made this large itching of it even more theatrical than Rembrandt's version Christ you see is in a blaze of light inclined head inclined towards heaven and Lazarus is obeying but for the moment we just see his two hands emerging like a horror movie Rembrandt went leavens one better and one bigger reframing his composition to show a dazed Lazarus between two groups of astonished spectators some of them recoiling some advancing as Christ turns away so we can't see his face but only his gesture of command hand up elbow out notice another experiment Rembrandt's has supplied the image with a picture frame I don't know if you can make it out but it is there a picture frame a rippled black band that imitates the flat evany frames that the Dutch used for prints and drawings that plus the rounded top here claims a special status for the etching its format is that of an altarpiece in the first lecture you saw the passion series that Rembrandt made for the prince of orange five you could say five miniature older pieces with full-blown action and special effects of light from heaven his etchings of these years a Rembrandt produced a few more stunning spectacles here an angel appears in the sky to announce the birth of Christ to the shepherds who are terrified the animals are too and the angel says fear not command that comes too late they're almost comical in their haste to get out of there this is an audacious pictures in many ways it's a show piece of animal locomotion and exotic locale and above all its nocturnal light effects itching this place plate required a kind of work that was new to Rembrandt and we have impressions from the unfinished first state to show us the sequence of the work he began by sketching the whole composition and then he went to the darkest areas to finish them working from back to front the least important areas for the story to begin with but the most important for the spectacle of light that he wanted to produce you see a landscape here at the left with a river a dense web of lines is used to make the rivers and the buildings visible but very softly barely indistinguishable this kind of nocturnal print had been invented recently by the engraver Hendrik out who used engraving to produce reproduce a small paintings by the German painter autumn Alzheimer here it's the flight into Egypt the refugee Holy Family making their way through the night and pass people camped by the fire that's reflected in the water it's a motif and a technical challenge that Rembrandt takes up in etching and solves in his own way even more subtly the main event in this first unfinished State is marvelous to behold the wonderful outline drawing of the heart of the matter the fright and flight this isn't any deep probing of human complex this is a this is sheer terror and incomprehension expressed in different ways that involves what looks to us anyway like a minimum labor and to the right of center to cattle are running away and a cow rises up on her knees and in the middle a ram as Rams I guess we'll do charges head on head down while a you looks balefully at him a few other animals are aware that something's not quite right but they haven't quite reacted yet if this were a painting we wouldn't have been intended to see this under drawing which is is but Rembrandt printed this state a few times quite likely to have a record of it and also to have something to display to pupils and sell to collectors this is a new way to value printed pictures it's not just as finished products but to value them for the process of making them and the displays of virtuosity involved well here's the finished product where we gain overall unity a lot of definition I look for example at the two Shepherds here it to the left but we've lost the delight of Rembrandt's cartoonish skill at seizing form and movement and emotion with just line unfortunately you can take your pick in the second state besides using a denser mesh of lines Rembrandt deepened the dark by using drypoint his secret weapon drive point appears more and more often from this point on Rembrandt made advances in more intimate scenes too this is the climax of the prodigal son story where the well-to-do young man has left home squandered his inheritance sunk to tending pigs and returns home destitute his father welcomes him back and when his virtuous brother complains about it the father says be glad that thy brother was dead and alive again he was lost and no now is found a story was often a chance for artists to show boisterous scenes of high life in contemporary costume as Rembrandt did ten years earlier he painted it just once in this picture where he showed himself as the prodigal and his wife Saskia as the bad girl and then he turned to the heart of the parable which is in the Gospel of Luke which is of course repentance and grace the unearned salvation that was the core of Calvinist belief no matter how bad you had been a leap of faith would give you eternal life it became a favourite subject for Rembrandt and reconciliation is in the poses the son kneeling and leaning forward the father enveloping and embracing the Sun the two making a single form unity in other words restored for help with a staging a Rembrandt leafed through his collection of engravings and found a Dutch artist who'd been there already this is Martin Martin from James Kirk whose composition and poses and stage extras Rembrandt took over and brought up-to-date Hammes Carrick's a prodigal son is maybe destitute but he's still handsome a Rembrandt's prodigal is something else again he is frightening to look at he is Harry an animal like Rembrandt is is not afraid in other words to inject ugly indecorous crude reality into a scene when it makes a point he's mastered a technique with the etching needle that abbreviates wherever possible getting denser when he needs more shade or more emphasis but remaining sketchy in brighter or less important areas like the left hand side in the back the background a few years later Rembrandt comes back to the subject in a pen drawing the composition is simpler the extras are reduced to a single boy as a witness the father holds his son's head and a gesture of benediction the Sun is still handsome in profile there's less exaggeration remember at what a great sure in good part because he was a great draftsman this is all drawn drawn by the way with a flexible quill pen with terrific fluency and speed and confidence Rembrandt came back to the subject yet again at the end of his life this that the left is the left side life-size painting in the Hermitage in bad condition but a moving image nonetheless the father makes the most eloquent gesture of acceptance and blessing like like the priest at an altar I'll have more to say about this painting in the last lecture when Rembrandt etchings Adam and Eve he uses all his virtuosity the bright sunlit background here is loose and sketchy yes that is an elephant which Rembrandt had been able to study alive in Amsterdam and is also a familiar symbol of virtue he outlines his figures confidently in the half shade and the shadows are luminous created with hatching and cross-hatching closest to us we can see that he's fortified the deep shadows with drypoint if you look at Raphael's version of the subject the one that artists knew best and virtually all of them must have known it you can see that the composition was useful to him but not the town in the background let alone the idealized physiques Rembrandt's Adam is well into middle age and has a very ordinary unimproved torso Eve lacks the seductive contrapposto that Rafi Rafi Oh gives her not to mention the svelte proportions instead she has the wide bottom and small top that's closer to the Dutch ideal of the time the stunning here a stunning thing here is the psychology of the situation Rembrandt used a drawing here on the left to play with the idea of showing Adam recoiling in horror at Eve's offer of the forbidden fruit in the etching she looks sly and he's he is the very picture of in decision he reaches out with one hand to touch the Apple and is resisting with the other hand it's like a good stage actor he's wavering with his body and his face it's a complicated situation how can you blame him I don't want to ignore it however the third party in this triangle Satan is here not as a snake up a tree as usual but as a dragon who really could have climbed up there with these claws of his he has a scaly tail and bat wings and what reads to me is a greedy expression so this imagination here and even humor a willingness to put decorum aside and think how it really might have been with our very human ancestors at the critical moment for all Christian believers their fall from grace there's a much less important seductions scene by Rembrandt but it's shown in a similar spirit this is a little edging of Joseph refusing the advances of the wife of his boss Potiphar in Egypt there are a lot of mildly titillating versions of versions of the subject in European art made for collectors who were looking for a little something more than just Bible illustration at the top here at the top is the print that served Rembrandt is a starting point the painting at the left is by a famous Italian contemporary and by contrast Rembrandt is explicit to the point of pornography and indecorous to the point of comedy but I have to point out the pictorial devices here which are very very wise and artful I mean the continuous snaky outline from her leg through her arm and shoulders that expresses their entanglement you could say and the darkness of the canopy bed to express the sin that she's offering in contrast to the light into which the virtuous Joseph makes his escape the most ambitious print from these years is this one it's in some ways a kind of reprieves of the Annunciation to the shepherds in size and especially in extravagant effects it's another scene of heavenly glory visited on earth the moment described in the golden legend when the Virgin Mary is on her deathbed soon to die and be taken up into heaven it's a bed fit for a queen and the disciples surround her like courtiers in the foreground at the left there's a sage like man with a large book as if to emphasize that the event fulfills prophecy in scriptures overhead angels spill down into the room and a burst of light and billows of clouds this is the first crowd scene where everybody contributes some personality or emotion John the Evangelist flings his arms open and a gesture of wonderment next to him several women pray a doctor takes her pulse and makes a show of solemn concentration a disciple applies a cloth to her face right down the line you can see how much individual character Rembrandt puts into their faces and poses and does so again with a minimum lines well the angels and overhead are weightless just quickly sketched and a massive lines suggest the parting clouds all this makes the strongest possible contrast to the deep dense shadows that he gives to the gravity bound table here in chairs that are closest to us by adding drypoint lines with this variety of ash lines plus drypoint Rembrandt was also able to create subtle and convincing effects of outdoor light here a procession is coming out of a shadowy arched area into the light and look how the figures nearest to us are treated with their features and most details obliterated the subject is the evil Haman being humiliated by his master aha Suarez the king of Babylon and he deserved it Haman had been cruel to Mordecai an elder of the Jews and plotted to kill him Queen Esther who's a Jew herself has revealed the plot and the King punishes Haman by making him lead old Mordecai in a triumphal procession he's on foot Haman is like a groom leading Mordecai's horse remember had packs a lot in the king and queen here are visible on a sort of balcony on the right side the whole mass of unruly spectators the turning procession and the powerful architecture that frames the picture he made this while he was working on a great composition that you all know and on this little piece of paper on the left there are many of the pictorial ideas that make the Nightwatch work by the way this isn't really the Nightwatch on the right it's a small 17th century copy that preserves the composition and the colors better than the original which was cut down the militiamen are crowded together as the chief officers lead them toward us in a procession the arch and the buildings play a large role in organizing the composition that crowd and that architecture also anticipated a picture that particularly interests us the hundred Gilder print was audacious technically even by Rembrandt's standard and never before never again would an etch sure creates such a spectrum of tones from light struck to coal black the composition too was a great feat of organization it was based on figure drawings that Rembrandt made of models posed in studios a few of the few that have survived this one was evidently early in the sequence and it shows quite a different grouping from any in the print three others show Rembrandt working out the group of figures to the right of Christ particularly the woman lying on the ground in one of these drawings she's sitting at the top holding her hands in beseeching gesture the drawing shows the pose in Reverse image that would be reversed in the print and here she's included in a group alert mouth open reaching up with one hand and again at the top in a more careful study the woman in the etching and can only make a feeble gesture with her eyes half closed she's obviously now closer to a expiring the etching is known only in a completed state not any earlier ones but there's evidence of many changes of light effects during the work on the even more Rembrandt experimented with papers he used dozens of different papers slick matte absorbent hard German and Dutch and Japanese white and all shades of sepia even getting giving different effects each one of them giving a different effect and he ain't the plate differently in many examples and wiped it differently leaving ink on the plate in areas for more tone there are about a hundred impressions no two exactly alike well I haven't said anything about the subject yet a nice it's time I did I should say subjects plural because Rembrandt combines four different passages in a single verse of the Gospel of st. Matthew that described Christ preaching in Judea to the faithful and healing the sick the most important of these is great multitudes followed him and He healed them there that's what's happening on the right side on the left side there's a discussion going on Matthew describes how Pharisees were conservative Jews drew Christ into a debate over whether under the law of Moses divorce should be legal and the disciples joined in I mean while there's some commotion just to the left of Christ Matthew says they brought children to him to lay hands on with prayer the disciples rebuked him Peter the disciples rebuked him but Jesus said let the children come to me do not try to stop them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these what you see is Peter pushing one mother away with his right hand we're at Christ on the other hand makes a welcoming gesture just below there's here just a little bit in from the left there's an uncertain looking mother toting a baby the little son steps forward tugging at a robe and pointing at Christ he's got the message the dog isn't just local color his form initiates that big upward curve that connects this section of the picture to the form of Christ Christ commands that little children be brought forward because they have a claim on life and a salvation it's theirs is the kingdom of heaven on the other side are the sick starting with a standing man closest to him the shadow he casts on Christ's robe is quite a wonderful touch the shadow of his imploring hands and his profile a person without power or substance in the world but a soul who makes a claim on Christ on behalf of the multitude that Matthew says was following him there in the half shadows physically and mentally afflicted some 1 foot someone oh and one in a wheelbarrow many of them are helping others or gesturing to others stressing their unselfishness you can see how rich and subtle all this is and how the lines almost disappear in an illusion of pure tone one to tell you don't see is at the far right edge under the arch it's a camel which would be an expensive transportation for poor people it's probably there as a reminder of another remark Christ made right after he blessed the children Matthew describes the dilemma of a rich young man who was unsure whether he could give up all his riches in order to follow Christ Rembrandt includes a fair-haired beardless finely dressed young man withdrawn from what's going on around him pondering his problem as the camel waits at the gate so Rembrandt's picture is a compilation a scene based on excerpts that he's pieced together to make a detailed image of the essence of Christ's message which is not about theology but about compassion for the have-nots for the neediest in society a few years after this exhausting project Rembrandt made something related but far simpler there isn't any biblical passage Illustrated the cast is smaller here the architecture is still important but clearer in fact there's a kind of stage space and the symmetrical layout that's classical in its organization and clarity the picture is about Christ's teaching and its reception in the backstreets by an audience of various ages and classes some of them absorbed by hearing it some skeptical but all visibly drawn to it there's more drypoint here and again we don't have any trial States just a fully achieved image that Rembrandt could vary from impression to impression by inking the plate differently and using different papers the people are of all ages and they are wonderful the child who's put aside the top he's been playing with and is tracing something on the ground the young man lost in thought the rapt listeners one scene from behind old men bored or sleepy and an elder coming forward - towards Christ the Rembrandt's career as a printmaker is going to end in about five years after this but in that time he made two very large scenes of the passion that put together all his virtuosity and his historical imagination both of them entirely in drypoint the lines gouged directly into the plate with no etching with acid there were many changes that we can follow through three states in this case and then a fourth and there were innumerable variations of inking and paper rememberin shows Christ at the last moments of his life when there was darkness over the earth and the veil of the temple was rent and when Christ cried out into thy hands I commend my spirit as critical as this moment is for Christian theology there's another that follows and that's when the Roman centurion who's been watching all this gets down from his horse and converts to Christ on the spot this was the all-important leap of faith that Luther and Calvin prescribed you see it in this Italian print which Rembrandt evidently used for the Centurions pose you see it a century earlier in a picture upstairs by the german painter lucas cranach where the all-important words are spelled right out on the panel the words hurt truly this was the son of God here you see the contrast between the scratched drypoint outlines almost all the work on this frieze of figures which has very little detail but lots of white paper to convey the dazzling spill of light and the dug in grooves of the tool which lots of berm to capture the ink Nicodemus and joseph of arimathea are leaving the scene perhaps to prepare the tomb for Christ which is suggested by this deep and ok opening mm cave-like at the right I want to look again at the people at the foot of the cross now mind you this is a finished work of art not a sketch when Brad signed it and sold many dozens of examples we look at abbreviation like this with eyes that are customed to it we know the story of the triumph of sketchiness up through Impressionism and into our own lifetimes we know how Cezanne reduced volumes to their bare essentials it's hard for us to be surprised by what we see here but had any artist ever made a finished work that rendered the human figure with so few lines not just you any human figures either this is the mother of God and an evangelist and disciples and just look at the group around Mary we see they all have Mantle's and sleeves and caps as well as expressive poses and facial expressions and convincing weight gravity and all this information from I don't know 40 or 50 lines the bare minimum of details and shading look at the man for example at the far right craning his neck to look up tilting his shoulders tugging at his cloak look at John the Evangelist in despair his expression is costume bright light is responsible for obliterating detail and at the same time it invites a shows skill in transcription that had not been seen before and this was for a scene that the artist believed was the most important event in human history Rembrandt made many impressions on various papers and a dozen or so on vellum on goat skin in other words which is a less absorbent material than most papers and takes dry pointed especially well the burr of the lines in the copper was wearing off as he printed and so he stopped and he went at the plate again and the result was a total transformation he burnished away most of his earlier design and he redrew it making many changes the crowd at the left is gone the cave on the right is gone he put the Centurion on his horse making him more prominent but less emotive his conversion isn't emphasized as much he added great streaks of shadow that swallow up the two thieves and he muted the bright light by laying down a new mesh of lines now it really is darkness at noon in some places you have to work hard to see what's going on the effect is even stranger than before more remote from us stripped of anything that isn't essential to Rembrandt's conception and remembers concesión conception seems to be to stun the viewer with a profound event Rembrandt found a model for the Centurion in a renaissance medal by pisanello showing a Milanese warlord in profile just what that choice significance probably but an archaic stylized touch very different from the big gesture over on the far left of the first Centurion two years later Rembrandt turned to another scene from the passion the same large size as the crucifixion and again done entirely in drypoint this is the moment when Christ having refused to respond to accusations has been turned over by the priests that Roman governor Pilate Pilate doesn't think he's guilty and because it's a holiday he follows the custom of releasing a prisoner that the crowd chooses the priests have already told the crowd that they should pick Barabbas the thief and in a moment they will do just that Rembrandt makes the governor's palace grand and oppressive both the mob is a kind of entertaining cross-section of the populace people of all ages seen from the back with an unmanned Terry look not many faces just costumes and gestures the scene on the dais presents Pilate the one in the big turban of the left almost sympathetically as he asks the mob to choose between Barabbas and Christ Barabbas is that squinty thug in the center already a servant at the left has brought water and a basin to Pilate so that he can wash his hands of the whole affair and Christ stands a little to one side and a kind of resigned complete resignation and acceptance in this impression you can see how the drypoint lines have their blurry soft focus character still intact but again after many printings the plate was wearing and again Rembrandt went over it to extend its life and make some major changes in this state that entertaining mob is gone he may have felt that it was upstaging the main actors but in any case we now we spectators can imagine the but we are the mob that the mob is us the mob that's ready to have Christ crucified that idea of complicity that had been remembrance mine for a long time for at least 30 years you saw it in the surface and those passion scenes he painted for the Prince of Orange where he actually cast himself as one of the executioner's Rembrandt replaced the crowd with something strange and sinister they are at the left to express two massive arched openings into some subterranean place a dungeon maybe between the arches there's a large shadowy bearded head and shoulders which seems to be part of a river god statue of the kind that was often displayed on the ground floor of renaissance buildings but whose significance here has never really been well explained Rembrandt kept the bearded man at the right here who steps forward at the edge his head still up in wonderment you remember the afflicted man here in the hundred Gilder print casting a shadow on the garment of Christ acknowledging his connection to and dependence on the Redeemer which it seems to be what Rembrandt's intention was in the work on the right in the 1650s Rembrandt continued to make small edgings of biblical subjects this is one the size of a postcard it isn't the story it's a made-up scene of the Madonna and Child indoors by a fire with a cat sleeping Rembrandt gives it seemingly accidental touches of sanctity her halo here is emphasized by the window pane the canopy chair here like a throne that she's stepped down from to sit on the floor and assume the attitude the traditional guise of the Madonna of humility Joseph here is not divine unlike his wife and child and he's often portrayed as a humble helpful outsider which he is here literally touch it touchingly outside looking in what rembered learned in the large drypoint prince of the passion he applied to a scene of christ's entombment he began with little or no ink on the face of the plate just in the etched and dry point grooves there's a convincing bright patch of light from an unseen Lantern and a subtle play of hatching and cross-hatching on the walls of the tomb here and on the huddle of mourners who are each shown with the simplest most direct outlines this print would be a masterpiece of printmaking if Rembrandt had stopped there but then after some more work he printed some impressions with a lot of ink left on the plate and just a little wiped off painted on the plate you could almost say this nearly obliterated the setting and later settings scene says rather of this same plate have still some surface tone still have a mood of deep gloom and sorrow but this has pools of light that have the effect of a kind of subtle stage illumination pulling the key elements out of the surrounding gloom but I put a lot of emphasis on narrative subjects mainly biblical because those are Rembrandt's greatest contributions to printmaking but he used the medium for other subjects and I'll show you a few portraits first a few lectures ago we saw how Rembrandt became the leading portrait painter in Amsterdam in the 1630s all kinds of important citizens sat for him the portrait edgings are mostly combined confined to a Rembrandt circle of acquaintances and friends we're gonna look at his self-portraits in the next lecture now one of these men was the tax inspector for the stuff holder the Prince of Orange this man young art abou Hart who Renda got to know through his dealings over the passion series that he painted for the prince this man was also an art collector and it's been speculated that this portrait was a favor by Rembrandt to ingratiate himself to the court I like the painting of Samson that Rembrandt tried to offer as a gift to the princes right-hand man constant Americans but was refused anyway it's a picture of the tax man at work with bags of coins a ledger staff of helpers he splendidly dressed in an old-fashioned costume of velvet and fur it may be a good likeness of our turbot heart we can't know that but it's also an inventory of goods that Rembrandt enumerates with a care that he'd soon apply to the poor in the sick in the hundred Gilder print it's also a permanent record of this officials performance of a duty to society a portrait of the following year shows another man in the performance of his duties these studies of Cornelius unstow a preacher of a liberal Mennonite congregation that his father-in-law Hendrick Ireland Burke belonged to at the right he's got an SLO sitting at a table gesturing to a book which would be a Bible it's evidently a study for the etching the other drawing shows Onslow full length of the far side talking to somebody outside the frame and again gesturing he used it for this life-size painting which is one of the greatest portraits ever painted and one of the most effective characterizations a double portrait of his Pete of the preacher on slow and his wife Alice Houghton who's shown as a person in need of consolation or instruction and on slope provides it mouth open in speech leaning towards her gesturing towards the source of wisdom and comfort the scriptures propped up and dramatically live Ephram bonus or bueno was a distinguished physician his portrait like the tax collectors has a blank strip at the bottom for someone to in an engraved inscription at praising the man in prose or poetry which was never added in this case we have no preparatory drawing but instead we've got something much more unusual and oil sketch that Rembrandt used for the etching with a few changes the print shows him standing as you see instead of sitting in action rather than in repose he's worked up the head with a dense mesh of lines to suggest the shifting light of the interior and it seems to me also suggests the mobile and subtle mind behind the eyes and its technique Rembrandt was working the same level of the hundred Gilder print in another print of the same year the technical and the spiritual merge again this is a portrait of a man who became a close friend the patrician businessman and poet yan six there had been nothing like this in Dutch portraiture six is shown unbuttoned informally posed in a setting that's full of illusions to Six's status the sword of a gentleman the tall room and the fine windows and details that speak of how he wishes to be regarded above all as a literary man books and papers that he's reading and as a connoisseur thus the painting on the wall protected from the light by a little curtain that's half pulled aside the light in the room not only lets him read but also suggests his enlightened state of mind there are subtleties of tone and texture that weren't present even in the hundred Gilder print look at the highlights on his shoulder and sleeve and the shadows of the drapery which he intensified with drypoint look how the sword handle here gleams in the half-light and the books six was just 29 years old a dozen years younger than Rembrandt and he was bound for distinction so it served Rembrandt's interest to give this portrait exceptional attention seven years later six had his portrait painted by Rembrandt this time as a country gentleman in a writing code which Rembrandt painted with a broad suggestive brushwork that's close to the limit of his virtuosity he did that knowing that ye on six as a connoisseur and a virtuoso in his own right would understand would recognize the skill involved in painting him one last portrait yama looked ma a successful goldsmith and silversmith Rembrandt gives him several attributes of his profession as you see tools as well as finished works included simply to show how much shrewdness and kindness Rembrandt could put into an etched likeness he's still but not static he contracts his forehead slightly and looks at us side long with a suggestion that his expression will change every hair in his head and beard seems alive Rembrandt had been capturing human quirks for a long time portraits gave him some latitude for this but not as much as pictures of ordinary people an everyday event so-called genre subjects these were an established tradition and printmaking from the start of his career beggars and poor people aroused Rembrandt's curiosity and affection and sometimes admiration these are two such pictures and sixteen years apart with similar subjects treated very differently in ways that revealed how Rembrandt grew and developed as an artist and you could say as well as a human at the left a door to door rat catcher is offering his services but the prospective customer isn't having any he's making a theatrical face and literally giving the back of his hand to the Rat Man notice the pet on the rat man's shoulder it's caricatured in the faces and the costumes played for laughs or at least for smiles and the etching needle is busy busy busy with crabbed lines for picturesque textures the scene dates this one from the time of the hundred guild or print and I think you feel it's compassionate spirit the old man at the door and gives a coin to the hurdy-gurdy player and his family people who come to him and it seems that nobody's ding dignity is diminished by this Rembrandt's technique is suitably spare and unshown my speedy finale is a quick look at Rembrandt's landscape prints I forgot I put the hog in here I really meant to take it out but anyway there's a detail which gives you a kind of delicious delicious spontaneous kind of way of treating all the details in a scene that does not have a happy ending and in the background a knife is being sharpened here you saw at the beginning of this lecture something of the tradition that Rembrandt inherited with edged landscapes these had quite a different side different subjects and ambitions local scenery by his eyes from the Felda a half a dozen other talented print makers - a plain style and the strange views of Hercules satyrs at the top foreign-looking even lunar looking elaborately etched and sometimes printed in color when he turned to landscape painting in the 1640s it was actually satyrs kind of vision that he that he embodied most his paintings are of fantastic mountains and rivers and are interesting exactly because they're not local not contemporary but vaguely historical and fantastic not so with the etchings it was local scenes here that it attracted him sort of plain spoken vernacular picture language that he chose here he treats the flat surroundings of Amsterdam with a delight in the open spaces and a lot of attention to the particulars the meandering Inlet that bordered by grasses and muddy banks the dense city towers and mills and ships did he sit out there in the field drawing right on the plate it's all so fresh that you believe he might well have done that although that would have been unlikely his other landscapes of the period are breathtaking but not quite as convincing spatially as this one this is a panorama at the top in which Rembrandt picks up the tradition of wide-angle views like the one at the bottom by esaias from the Velva and makes the world seem to turn on a single dilapidated farm building on the right an idyllic patch of river with a castle and here a distant view of city across the land Rembrandt assembled view in his studio may using drawings like the one underneath you could say field notes that must have been true here to the most ambitious of his landscape prints by far almost a foot wide with a full range of his techniques on display including drypoint in the shadows plus something he never attempts before or after real weather passing through slanting rain roiling clouds and the bright Sun coming out in the distance he wasn't recording an actual place but creating a kind of composite that would be satisfying and credible and vivid and embody the benevolent forces in nature in Calvinists earns God's gift to humans he walks in the countryside around Amsterdam and these walks gave him lots of material here something distinctive about the geography of the western provinces water everywhere and your vantage point is down low those give you long views into the distance at times and they're startling jumps of fear scale in your field of view like the masts here up close to us and in the far distance jumps of scale that give you a measure of just the great distance between the two of all the landscape edgings this is the sketchiest just sheer virtuosity a kind of drawing in multiple and that kind of open light treatment recursion a distant view at the right and another catching he made in the same year at a spot on the Amstel outside the city on the left though is something entirely different and wonderful a cluster of trees including an ancient willow juxtaposed to the prosaic life of the everyday river and town this bunch of greenery conceals a pair of lovers a man crowning the woman with a wreath like a shepherd in an Arcadian romance of the kind that the Dutch were reading and writing at the same time Rembrandt takes that twisted tree ancient and putting out leaves nonetheless and makes it into a saintly attribute it belongs here to a retired bishop Jerome who's living in the rocky wilderness the tree has been fashioned into a drop front desk handy for his work of translating the Bible and his other attribute a faithful lion looks out for him this panorama of the fields of bloomin dal is one of a kind for Rembrandt it's a view of a real place across the fields towards Harlem a real locale that other artists had found but Rembrandt makes a sort of super wide angle you of its a locale he studied in drawings like this one at the left and he surely knew and may have owned Hercules satyrs fetching on the right but he did away with alternating lard enlightened dark fields and relied on diminishing scale and diagonals to create the breathtaking deep space here one last edging to end with a tiny picture of a goldsmith not a portrait but the image of a nameless artist in his studio his fire for melting metal is beside him he holds a hammer and he stands with his arm around a statute that he's evidently made and put on a pedestal not just any statue but it's a statue of the ancient symbol of Caritas charity a mother holding her children the sculptor tilts his head the way she does both our parents the image is saying the work of art is the child not just of their inspiration but also of hard exacting manual work this man has applied himself to shaping the metal just as Rembrandt has etched the plate and this moment of loving satisfaction with the work is one that Rembrandt understands and I think we can share in the next lecture we will see how Rembrandt saw himself in the mirror and presented himself in his self-portraits so I invite you to come back thank you

Channel: Yale University Art Gallery

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Length: 68min 16sec (4096 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2016