Etchings in the realm of the divine

An exhibition of Rembrandt's etchings at the Chester Beatty Library will be one of the cultural highlights of the summer, writes…

An exhibition of Rembrandt's etchings at the Chester Beatty Library will be one of the cultural highlights of the summer, writes Aidan Dunne

A SHOWCASE OF Rembrandt's work Rembrandt - Etchings from the Rembrandthuis, which opens at the Chester Beatty Library from Wednesday next, promises to be one of this year's unmissable exhibitions.

The Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt lived and worked, is not only a centre of study devoted to the artist but also holds an important collection of his work, particularly his graphic work. That, and the Chester Beatty's own rich collection of European prints have made possible this exceptional exhibition of etchings. With 73 works in all, it is handsomely representative of his entire range in the medium and features many of his most famous etchings.

A miller's son, Rembrandt van Rijn was born in 1606 in Leyden and was apprenticed to a little-known painter before working with Peter Lastman in Amsterdam, an experience that opened his eyes to a wealth of artistic possibility that he was well equipped to explore.

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He set up as a painter in Leyden before moving to Amsterdam at the beginning of the 1630s where he worked industriously and with considerable success as a portrait painter. His group portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, the first of a whole series of masterpieces of Western painting that he produced, brought him a measure of fame.

When he married the well-connected Saskia van Uylenburgh he embraced the high life, but her death in 1642 coincided with the start of an inexorable decline in his fortunes, culminating in bankruptcy in 1656.

His relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels was unorthodox and intense.

She joined the household as a servant and the widowed Rembrandt, who was having an affair with another servant (who he cruelly dispensed with), fell in love with her and she with him. Or so we can conclude from her fiercely-protective management of his life and finances thereafter.

She was condemned by the church for living in sin, which lends an edge to Rembrandt casting her in such morally-compromised roles as Bathsheba and Susanna in his paintings. But Hendrickje was cut down by plague in 1663. Rembrandt's sense of loss is palpable in his self-portraits. The final tragedy of his life was the death of his son Titus, shortly before his own death in 1669.

Historians including Simon Schama and Gary Schwartz (whose book Rembrandt's Universe is a brilliant, exhaustively-researched, copiously-illustrated account of the artist and his world) have detailed Rembrandt's professional worldliness as an artist. He raided the archives ruthlessly, recalling Picasso's response to the charge of artistic appropriation: "If it's worth stealing, I steal it."

Rembrandt looked to the Italians, most famously to Caravaggio, but also to Germany and Albrecht Durer, a graphic artist of genius whose work Rembrandt regarded, Schwartz says, proprietorially. While for the most part he looked backwards, to earlier exemplars, he also kept a competitive eye on Rubens.

Rembrandt is one of those figures who are both thoroughly of their time and yet transcend it, attaining something like superhuman status.

Remarkably, within his lifetime Dutch art produced another such figure in the form of Jan Vermeer. They are intriguingly linked by a third, the formidable artist Carel Fabritius.

Throughout his working life Rembrandt taught a large number of highly-capable students, and Fabritius is generally regarded as being the best of them. He moved from Amsterdam to Delft where, tragically, his life was cut short when he was killed in an explosion at a gunpowder magazine. Vermeer, a resident of Delft, is known to have owned several of his paintings, may have been his pupil, and was certainly influenced by his use of optics.

It's particularly interesting that Fabritius occupies a middle ground between Rembrandt and Vermeer because, while they are both artists of towering stature, their temperaments and achievements are strikingly different. Vermeer's cool, considered allegories, with their disconcertingly photographic appearance, brought painting to a new level of optical sophistication. He was sparing in his output with fewer than 40 recognised pictures extant and seems to have worked entirely within the medium of painting. Rembrandt, on the other hand, was something else entirely.

HE WAS HUGELY productive across a wide range of media and genres, including portraits and self-portraits, biblical scenes, allegorical and everyday subjects, nudes and landscapes. Like Caravaggio, Rembrandt cast everyday people in biblical roles, often with considerable theatrical flair. Well over 600 paintings are attributed to him and, even allowing for the fact that some of these are contested, the vast majority are widely accepted as being his, rather than by ex-pupils and followers. But that is only part of the story. He was also prolific as a graphic artist, with a staggering quantity of work to his credit including close to 300 etchings and 2,000 drawings.

Nor was graphic art a mere adjunct to his painting. His fame was built on his reputation as a graphic artist. As multiples, etchings were more portable and affordable than paintings. He made them using a single basic technique, that of intaglio printing, a fairly direct way of working in which the artist draws into a prepared ground on a copper plate, selectively exposing the metal, which is then etched with acid. Rembrandt is known to have devised his own recipe for a 'soft' ground, a mixture of asphaltum, wax and mastic, one that was widely known and adopted elsewhere.

One of the works in the Chester Beatty exhibition, Christ Preaching is best known by another title that says a great deal about the relative worth attached to Rembrandt's etchings. It's called The Hundred Guilder Print and it is a major work, a tour de force in terms of narrative, composition and light and shade. Its nickname derives from the fact that within years of its appearance an art dealer, offering the etching to the bishop of Bruges, said that several copies had changed hands for 100 guilder apiece and more, whereas he was only looking for 30. That, as Schwartz points out, was still rather more than the average cost of a substantial oil painting at the time.

It's no accident that Rembrandt warmed to a method of etching that hinged on drawing. He was a draughtsman to the core. His drawings have an incredibly fluent, intimate, conversational quality, and impart the artist's pleasure in describing every aspect of the world.

A genius at naturalistic observation, he relished inanimate detail, but he was really fascinated by the challenge of dramatising character. This applies to himself as much as anyone: he made in excess of 100 self portraits.

The impetus was not egotism or narcissism. Taken in all, these works provide an extraordinary chronicle of a life, reflecting stages of ambition, pride, triumphs and disappointments and culminating in a sequence of late paintings that, with remarkable honesty, bespeak a rueful self-knowledge and an unflinching acceptance of the realities of ageing and the sadness of loss. With age, however, came unparalleled artistic eloquence, so that even an essentially tragic painting such as the great self-portrait of 1665, now at Kenwood House in London, is a masterpiece of psychological insight and tremendous affirmation of the human spirit.

Rembrandt - Etchings from the Rembrandthuis is at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Castle from June 25 to Sept 14