Idbury Prints: An online gallery of original fine art prints

REMBRANDT (Dutch / 1606-1669)

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was the first modern master of etching, producing over 300 etchings, including 20 self-portraits; he pioneered the direct use of a drypoint needle on the etching plate to add final touches to an image. Many of Rembrandt's plates were reprinted again and again after his death, with a little less detail each time. Our prints are not Rembrandt originals, but interpretative etchings after Rembrandt by various 19th-century French artists. The work of Rembrandt had a talismanic quality for the artists of the French etching revival. Many started their printmaking careers by copying Rembrandt etchings (the Impressionist printmaker Norbert Goeneutte is a case in point) or by brilliantly imitating Rembrandt's style (as in the early work of Goeneutte's friend Henri Guérard, before he too turned to Impressionism under the influence of Manet and Goeneutte. Fine art journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Paris à l'Eau-Forte frequently commissioned etchings after Rembrandt, and the highest praise of their editors was to compare the work of some newcomer to that of the old master. We have etchings after Rembrandt by a roll-call of nineteenth-century etchers, including Charles Courtry, Jean Delzers, Roger Favier, Léopold Flameng, Léon Gaucherel, Jules Jacquemart, Carl Koepping, H. Leseigneur, Marcel Louveau-Rouveyre, N. S. Mossolow, Paul Rajon, William Unger, and Charles Waltner. See: Alison McQueen, "Reinventing the Biography, Creating the Myth: Rembrandt in Nineteenth-Century France" in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol 28:3, 200-2001.