“Rembrandt is probably best known for his paintings, but he was also a consummate printmaker and we are privileged to have 93 of his fabulous etchings that were left to Norwich Castle by a collector in the 1950s.
Works on paper cannot be on constant display, and as it is now 30 years since they were last exhibited, we thought it was time to put a show together in our building, which few people think of as a place to view Rembrandt’s works.
While the artist was largely unrivalled in his use of colour, these etchings show his mastery of light and dark. Rembrandt could use black lines and the white space around them like no one else.
He was probably the first person to use print as an art form. When he started working in the 1630s, the technique was around a century old and little more than a means of reproduction.
Usually, an artist would give an illustration to a printer who would engrave it onto a plate to produce multiple copies of the work, but Rembrandt fiddled around with the process and made it into a new medium.
He made several “states” of each plate, creating different effects through dramatic changes in light and dark as exemplified by my chosen piece, the fourth version Rembrandt made of it.
In the first state of this work, there is a lot of light and you can see the background of the cave clearly, with all the figures around Jesus’s body plainly visible, as are a couple of skulls on a shelf behind them.
By the time we get to this fourth state, however, a lot of that detail has gone as Rembrandt added ink to make the plate darker and darker to focus on the raw emotion of the scene with increasing intensity.
He freely experimented with his light sources and you can see in this image that there is a candle or torch present even though you do not know exactly where it is; the light is cast upwards to highlight the grief on the darkened faces.
Once again, Rembrandt excels at using light in the physical and metaphorical senses of the word. Viewers know that the feeling of desolation at the death of Jesus will lift in three days with the resurrection, but at this moment the Virgin Mary, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are in the depths of despair mourning the loss.
Of course, it needn’t be Jesus in the picture; it could be anyone caught in the dark night of the human soul as it is a terribly universal theme.
Rembrandt was a genius at capturing his characters – historical, Biblical or contemporary – as real people caught in human situations.”
Interview by John Holt. Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness runs at Norwich Castle until 7 January 2018
Works on paper cannot be on constant display, and as it is now 30 years since they were last exhibited, we thought it was time to put a show together in our building, which few people think of as a place to view Rembrandt’s works.
While the artist was largely unrivalled in his use of colour, these etchings show his mastery of light and dark. Rembrandt could use black lines and the white space around them like no one else.
He was probably the first person to use print as an art form. When he started working in the 1630s, the technique was around a century old and little more than a means of reproduction.
Usually, an artist would give an illustration to a printer who would engrave it onto a plate to produce multiple copies of the work, but Rembrandt fiddled around with the process and made it into a new medium.
He made several “states” of each plate, creating different effects through dramatic changes in light and dark as exemplified by my chosen piece, the fourth version Rembrandt made of it.
In the first state of this work, there is a lot of light and you can see the background of the cave clearly, with all the figures around Jesus’s body plainly visible, as are a couple of skulls on a shelf behind them.
By the time we get to this fourth state, however, a lot of that detail has gone as Rembrandt added ink to make the plate darker and darker to focus on the raw emotion of the scene with increasing intensity.
He freely experimented with his light sources and you can see in this image that there is a candle or torch present even though you do not know exactly where it is; the light is cast upwards to highlight the grief on the darkened faces.
Once again, Rembrandt excels at using light in the physical and metaphorical senses of the word. Viewers know that the feeling of desolation at the death of Jesus will lift in three days with the resurrection, but at this moment the Virgin Mary, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are in the depths of despair mourning the loss.
Of course, it needn’t be Jesus in the picture; it could be anyone caught in the dark night of the human soul as it is a terribly universal theme.
Rembrandt was a genius at capturing his characters – historical, Biblical or contemporary – as real people caught in human situations.”
Interview by John Holt. Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness runs at Norwich Castle until 7 January 2018
