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Lot Essay
...'also here is the rarest print published by Rembrandt, in which Christ is healing the sick, and I know that in Holland [it] has been sold various times for 100 guilders and more; and it is as large as this sheet of paper, very fine and lovely, but ought to cost 30 guilders. It is very beautiful and pure.'
So states Jan Meyssens of Antwerp to Carolus van den Bosch, Bishop of Bruges, in a letter dated 9 February 1654. This extract provides the clue as to how this print gained its famous sobriquet: the print was so desirable that only a few years after its creation it was changing hands for the exceptionally high price of one hundred guilders.
The Hundred Guilder Print, as it became known, was much desired by collectors and praised by scholars and connoisseurs from early on. In the 18th century, Edmé-François Gersaint (1694–1750), who compiled the first systematic catalogue of Rembrandt prints, called it his ‘most capital performance’ and admired it for having ‘tout l’esprit imaginable’. In 1911, Charles J. Holmes (1868-1936) wrote that the print ‘aims at combining in a single plate force, pathos, mystery, and complexity, and does so with a brilliance and power that are beyond praise. In boldness of mass, richness of innovation, and certainly of line, no other print of Rembrandt surpasses it.’ (Holmes, p. 97) In our own time, Clifford Ackley placed it in the wider cannon of printmaking as follows: ‘It is a self-conscious masterpiece, a ‘just-try-and-surpass-this’ challenge thrown down to his contemporaries and to future generations of artists. It falls into the same category as such legendarily ambitious and virtuoso artistic statements in print as Albrecht Dürer’s Master Prints […] in the early sixteenth century, or, in our time, Pablo Picasso’s Minotauromachia.’ (Ackley, p. 204)
These three quotes only confirm what is immediately manifest when looking at a fine, early impression of The Hundred Guilder Print: it is a highly ambitious and complex, even complicated work, which poses countless questions. ‘Looking and overlooking’, as Jürgen Müller quipped, ‘go hand-in-hand in the Hundred Guilder Print.’ (J. Müller, ‘Homer and the Pharisees – A new aspect of Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print’, in: Buck et al., p. 45) Never before had Rembrandt attempted anything on this scale, richness of detail, depth of thought and technical sophistication in print.
To describe its subject or find a suitable title for the print already poses problems, and today’s habitual title Christ healing the Sick only covers some of its content. In the past, the print had also been known as Christ preaching, which is equally correct and insufficient. It is now well established that in fact this multitudinous scene depicts or alludes to almost the entire narrative of Matthew 19 which, rather than paraphrasing it, is worth quoting at length:
And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these sayings, he departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judæa beyond Jordan; And great multitudes followed him; and he healed them there.
The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him […]
Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence.
And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.
Rembrandt combined not only the various episodes – the healing of the sick, the doubting pharisees, the welcoming of the children, the advice he gives to the rich young man, the proverb of the camel going through the eye of a needle – into one single scene or rather various scenes within a single image, but also attempted to convey the overarching message of the text. He does so by depicting many of the events, but also by developing a whole new pictorial language, which is symbolic of Christ’s teachings and of His nature as the Savior and Redeemer. It is a language that is based primarily on light and shadow. This is immediately evident in the way Rembrandt renders the light emanating from the head of Christ, whose features are ethereal, insubstantial, compared to the many other faces in the crowd. In a particularly subtle, but all the more astonishing detail, the shadow of Christ’s raised left hand projected onto his cloak seems to reach down towards the shadow of the hands of the praying woman kneeling below him to the right. What at first glance appears to be a random play of light and shade is in fact a spiritual manifestation: ‘Rembrandt seems to be giving form to the paradox of incarnation: Christ is both a real human and a true god.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 53) Above all, however, The Hundred Guilder Print is a dualistic image, divided into a brightly lit left and a dark right side. It is through this division that Rembrandt finds a visual equivalent for the fundamental lesson of Christ’s teachings and the seemingly paradoxical final sentence of Matthew 19: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
Christopher White wrote that ‘the underlying theme is unmistakably: Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ (White, p. 54) Müller is more explicit in his interpretation: ‘we can point to these New Testament paradoxes of the last being the first or the humbling of the exalted. In the Christian perspective, the world is subject to the same law of reversal. For Rembrandt, the phenomena of the world stand in inverse proportion to their actual importance. He pushes this idea so far that he reverses representational conventions.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 56) As a result, the powerful, the rich, the educated and doubtful are predominantly on the light left side, while the sick, the poor, the humble and faithful are on the dark right side of the image.
For the sheer complexity but also balance of the composition, The Hundred Guilder Print has frequently been compared to Rembrandt’s own monumental painting The Night Watch of 1642, but also to Raphael’s fresco of The School of Athens. Martin Royalton-Kisch remarked that ‘the artist’s concern is to bind figures together into dynamic units in a manner akin to those created by Raphael and other Renaissance masters. That the etching has the poise of a School of Athens is a direct result of this labour.’ (Hinterding et al., p. 78-79) There can be no doubt that Rembrandt was aware of and sought inspiration in 16th-century Italian art, and as an avid print collector himself would have had access to Raphael’s as well as Michelangelo’s compositions through engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano, and Giorgio Ghisi. Jürgen Müller found numerous figures and poses quoted directly from Italian High Renaissance compositions which, according to him, Rembrandt incorporated into The Hundred Guilder Print ‘in order to teach a lesson to those critics who accuse him of being ignorant of classical and Italian art. In this way the etching takes an anti-classical stance.’ He goes even further in his analysis of Rembrandt’s citations in this print and, for example, recognizes hidden portraits of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther amongst the Pharisees: ‘I want to show that Rembrandt set out to deliver a basic statement of his Christian position, one that was implicitly critical of confessional schism and divisive dogmatism.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 56 & 45)
If the actual image and its interpretation were complex and multi-layered, so are the hypotheses regarding the history of its creation. One would expect that an image of such ambition, scope and refinement would take an unusual amount of preparation. Indeed, from a total of only around 28 drawings by Rembrandt relating directly to his prints which have survived, six are preparatory sketches for The Hundred Guilder Print. Not only did Rembrandt develop whole groups of figures and individual characters and poses in these sketches, he also made numerous revisions on the copper plate itself, which are still faintly visible as pentimenti, most noticeably around the head of Christ and the position of His hands. There is however nothing to indicate that the composition itself underwent any drastic changes. Still, the existence of several preparatory sketches, the pentimenti, and above all a perceived discrepancy of styles within the same image has prompted speculation regarding the length of time Rembrandt may have worked on this print, from the first idea to the completion of the plate. Some scholars, including Christopher White, assumed that several years may have passed between the artist beginning and finishing his work on the plate, and thought the artist may at some point have abandoned the plate, only to return to it many years later (see White, p. 61; and B. Welzel, in: Bevers et al., p. 244). Martin Royalton-Kisch even thought it ‘likely, given that he worked on the plate over several years, that earlier trials were made, in states that no longer survive.’ (Hinterding et al., p. 80) ‘Usually’, as White remarked, ‘one turns to the etchings for help in dating the drawings, but on this occasion the situation is reversed but we are left hardly more enlightened.' (White, ibid.) Royalton-Kisch however was quite firm when it came to the dating of the preparatory drawings. All of them, he thought, were technically and stylistically consistent with a dating to the mid-1640s. This, one would think, almost rules out the theory that Rembrandt may have begun working on this project as early as 1639.
Unless further evidence came to light, it is impossible to say when the concept for this print first took root in the artist’s mind. Although many commentators assumed that Rembrandt may have worked on this plate over the course of several years, there is nothing to prove it. Erik Hinterding’s more recent research has however shown that, although all eight known impressions of the first state were printed on Japan paper, there is enough paper evidence to prove that the plate had been completed around 1648 and that Rembrandt made the small changes of the second state very shortly after. In fact, he states that ‘although some early impressions were evidently made on western paper, in the first instance the second state also appears to have been printed predominantly on oriental paper.’ (Hinterding, p. 157-8) Perhaps even more importantly, Hinterding doubts whether Rembrandt even printed many impressions himself, beyond those of the first state and the very earliest of the second, such as the present example.
To understand the conundrum of Rembrandt planning and creating the technically, conceptually and intellectually most demanding print of his career, and then – once he had completed the plate to his satisfaction - only printing it in a few dozen impressions, we must look again at the actual work. The whole print is extremely delicately executed. There is nothing heavy or forceful about it, irrespective of the strong contrasts between light and shade. Even the areas of intense brightness and profound darkness are bound together by a very subtly graded middle tone. Whether in etching, drypoint or burin, the lines are fine, narrow and mostly quite shallow, which lends the whole image the smooth appearance of a meticulously executed painting or a mezzotint, a printing technique which had only been invented in 1642. It is for this very nuanced, tonal quality that The Hundred Guilder Print has been called Rembrandt’s most ‘painterly’ print. It is a manner of printmaking he had perfected only a year earlier, in the portrait of Jan Six (see lot 16). In early impressions, this is a work – like The Hundred Guilder Print - of almost inconceivable subtlety and elegance. Yet therein lay the problem with both plates: once the tiny touches of drypoint, the most delicate lines of engraving, the fine but very dense cross-hatching in the darkest areas started to wear and the middle-tones to disappear, the image began to fall apart, to look patchy and discordant.
It is at this point that an observation by Barbara Welzel is of great relevance: ‘One of the strands of tradition to which research has as yet paid too little attention constantly describes the Hundred Guilder Print as extraordinarily rare’ (see Bevers et al., p. 244). The earliest commentators, including Meyssens quoted at the beginning of this note, all stressed the rarity of the print. With over one hundred second-state impressions recorded by Hinterding and Rutgers in public collections alone, the print as such can by no means be described as very rare. What these 17th-century texts reveal is that Rembrandt himself must have pulled only a small number of impressions himself, of both the first and second states, simply because the plate did not yield many prints of high quality. The present example, printed on precious Japan paper, undoubtedly comes from this very first print-run of the second state.
It is entirely within Rembrandt’s character and development as an artist - once he had abandoned the concept of printmaking in the style of Rubens’ workshop and embraced etching as means of expression rather than a commercial enterprise - to make a print of the greatest aspiration, complication and refinement, just because he could and wanted to: for himself, for friends, colleagues, patrons and important collectors.
It is of course true that in The Hundred Guilder Print we find echoes of earlier works – prints as well as painted works, such as the great grisaille of the Sermon of Saint John the Baptist of 1634-1635, today at the Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister in Berlin. It may in fact have been this small oil sketch which gave Rembrandt the initial idea for a print of Christ preaching, a subject which he seems to have invented with this etching. From this, however, it cannot be inferred that these two works were begun concurrently or even successively. Rather than labouring for years over a challenge he had set himself, and then struggling to complete it, it seems far more likely that Rembrandt, aged around forty, set out to make a masterpiece, the culmination of nearly twenty years of experience and experimentation as a printmaker, and threw everything at it. We know that he had explored the effects of light and shade, both subtle and bold; that he had understood that intense contrasts create tension and drama; that unfinished passages engage the viewer and thereby enlivened a scene; that brevity means caricature and attention to detail inspires empathy. By then he had mastered the different techniques of working with acid, the needle and the burin, and knew how to combine them for best effect. All this he did, at once and on a single large plate, in The Hundred Guilder Print. Barbara Welzel came to just this conclusion when she wrote that ‘The variety of methods in print-making should not, in this case, be understood to indicate that Rembrandt evaluated the work over several years, but rather as a record of Rembrandt’s reference to his own oeuvre – a deliberate display of virtuosity’ (B. Welzel, in: Bevers et al., p. 245). And yet, we should not forget that the artist did not live in secular times. The Hundred Guilder Print must have been a highly important work for Rembrandt not just artistically, but spiritually: an attempt to depict Christ as he saw Him.
So states Jan Meyssens of Antwerp to Carolus van den Bosch, Bishop of Bruges, in a letter dated 9 February 1654. This extract provides the clue as to how this print gained its famous sobriquet: the print was so desirable that only a few years after its creation it was changing hands for the exceptionally high price of one hundred guilders.
The Hundred Guilder Print, as it became known, was much desired by collectors and praised by scholars and connoisseurs from early on. In the 18th century, Edmé-François Gersaint (1694–1750), who compiled the first systematic catalogue of Rembrandt prints, called it his ‘most capital performance’ and admired it for having ‘tout l’esprit imaginable’. In 1911, Charles J. Holmes (1868-1936) wrote that the print ‘aims at combining in a single plate force, pathos, mystery, and complexity, and does so with a brilliance and power that are beyond praise. In boldness of mass, richness of innovation, and certainly of line, no other print of Rembrandt surpasses it.’ (Holmes, p. 97) In our own time, Clifford Ackley placed it in the wider cannon of printmaking as follows: ‘It is a self-conscious masterpiece, a ‘just-try-and-surpass-this’ challenge thrown down to his contemporaries and to future generations of artists. It falls into the same category as such legendarily ambitious and virtuoso artistic statements in print as Albrecht Dürer’s Master Prints […] in the early sixteenth century, or, in our time, Pablo Picasso’s Minotauromachia.’ (Ackley, p. 204)
These three quotes only confirm what is immediately manifest when looking at a fine, early impression of The Hundred Guilder Print: it is a highly ambitious and complex, even complicated work, which poses countless questions. ‘Looking and overlooking’, as Jürgen Müller quipped, ‘go hand-in-hand in the Hundred Guilder Print.’ (J. Müller, ‘Homer and the Pharisees – A new aspect of Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print’, in: Buck et al., p. 45) Never before had Rembrandt attempted anything on this scale, richness of detail, depth of thought and technical sophistication in print.
To describe its subject or find a suitable title for the print already poses problems, and today’s habitual title Christ healing the Sick only covers some of its content. In the past, the print had also been known as Christ preaching, which is equally correct and insufficient. It is now well established that in fact this multitudinous scene depicts or alludes to almost the entire narrative of Matthew 19 which, rather than paraphrasing it, is worth quoting at length:
And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these sayings, he departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judæa beyond Jordan; And great multitudes followed him; and he healed them there.
The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him […]
Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence.
And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.
Rembrandt combined not only the various episodes – the healing of the sick, the doubting pharisees, the welcoming of the children, the advice he gives to the rich young man, the proverb of the camel going through the eye of a needle – into one single scene or rather various scenes within a single image, but also attempted to convey the overarching message of the text. He does so by depicting many of the events, but also by developing a whole new pictorial language, which is symbolic of Christ’s teachings and of His nature as the Savior and Redeemer. It is a language that is based primarily on light and shadow. This is immediately evident in the way Rembrandt renders the light emanating from the head of Christ, whose features are ethereal, insubstantial, compared to the many other faces in the crowd. In a particularly subtle, but all the more astonishing detail, the shadow of Christ’s raised left hand projected onto his cloak seems to reach down towards the shadow of the hands of the praying woman kneeling below him to the right. What at first glance appears to be a random play of light and shade is in fact a spiritual manifestation: ‘Rembrandt seems to be giving form to the paradox of incarnation: Christ is both a real human and a true god.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 53) Above all, however, The Hundred Guilder Print is a dualistic image, divided into a brightly lit left and a dark right side. It is through this division that Rembrandt finds a visual equivalent for the fundamental lesson of Christ’s teachings and the seemingly paradoxical final sentence of Matthew 19: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
Christopher White wrote that ‘the underlying theme is unmistakably: Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ (White, p. 54) Müller is more explicit in his interpretation: ‘we can point to these New Testament paradoxes of the last being the first or the humbling of the exalted. In the Christian perspective, the world is subject to the same law of reversal. For Rembrandt, the phenomena of the world stand in inverse proportion to their actual importance. He pushes this idea so far that he reverses representational conventions.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 56) As a result, the powerful, the rich, the educated and doubtful are predominantly on the light left side, while the sick, the poor, the humble and faithful are on the dark right side of the image.
For the sheer complexity but also balance of the composition, The Hundred Guilder Print has frequently been compared to Rembrandt’s own monumental painting The Night Watch of 1642, but also to Raphael’s fresco of The School of Athens. Martin Royalton-Kisch remarked that ‘the artist’s concern is to bind figures together into dynamic units in a manner akin to those created by Raphael and other Renaissance masters. That the etching has the poise of a School of Athens is a direct result of this labour.’ (Hinterding et al., p. 78-79) There can be no doubt that Rembrandt was aware of and sought inspiration in 16th-century Italian art, and as an avid print collector himself would have had access to Raphael’s as well as Michelangelo’s compositions through engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano, and Giorgio Ghisi. Jürgen Müller found numerous figures and poses quoted directly from Italian High Renaissance compositions which, according to him, Rembrandt incorporated into The Hundred Guilder Print ‘in order to teach a lesson to those critics who accuse him of being ignorant of classical and Italian art. In this way the etching takes an anti-classical stance.’ He goes even further in his analysis of Rembrandt’s citations in this print and, for example, recognizes hidden portraits of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther amongst the Pharisees: ‘I want to show that Rembrandt set out to deliver a basic statement of his Christian position, one that was implicitly critical of confessional schism and divisive dogmatism.’ (Müller, ibid., p. 56 & 45)
If the actual image and its interpretation were complex and multi-layered, so are the hypotheses regarding the history of its creation. One would expect that an image of such ambition, scope and refinement would take an unusual amount of preparation. Indeed, from a total of only around 28 drawings by Rembrandt relating directly to his prints which have survived, six are preparatory sketches for The Hundred Guilder Print. Not only did Rembrandt develop whole groups of figures and individual characters and poses in these sketches, he also made numerous revisions on the copper plate itself, which are still faintly visible as pentimenti, most noticeably around the head of Christ and the position of His hands. There is however nothing to indicate that the composition itself underwent any drastic changes. Still, the existence of several preparatory sketches, the pentimenti, and above all a perceived discrepancy of styles within the same image has prompted speculation regarding the length of time Rembrandt may have worked on this print, from the first idea to the completion of the plate. Some scholars, including Christopher White, assumed that several years may have passed between the artist beginning and finishing his work on the plate, and thought the artist may at some point have abandoned the plate, only to return to it many years later (see White, p. 61; and B. Welzel, in: Bevers et al., p. 244). Martin Royalton-Kisch even thought it ‘likely, given that he worked on the plate over several years, that earlier trials were made, in states that no longer survive.’ (Hinterding et al., p. 80) ‘Usually’, as White remarked, ‘one turns to the etchings for help in dating the drawings, but on this occasion the situation is reversed but we are left hardly more enlightened.' (White, ibid.) Royalton-Kisch however was quite firm when it came to the dating of the preparatory drawings. All of them, he thought, were technically and stylistically consistent with a dating to the mid-1640s. This, one would think, almost rules out the theory that Rembrandt may have begun working on this project as early as 1639.
Unless further evidence came to light, it is impossible to say when the concept for this print first took root in the artist’s mind. Although many commentators assumed that Rembrandt may have worked on this plate over the course of several years, there is nothing to prove it. Erik Hinterding’s more recent research has however shown that, although all eight known impressions of the first state were printed on Japan paper, there is enough paper evidence to prove that the plate had been completed around 1648 and that Rembrandt made the small changes of the second state very shortly after. In fact, he states that ‘although some early impressions were evidently made on western paper, in the first instance the second state also appears to have been printed predominantly on oriental paper.’ (Hinterding, p. 157-8) Perhaps even more importantly, Hinterding doubts whether Rembrandt even printed many impressions himself, beyond those of the first state and the very earliest of the second, such as the present example.
To understand the conundrum of Rembrandt planning and creating the technically, conceptually and intellectually most demanding print of his career, and then – once he had completed the plate to his satisfaction - only printing it in a few dozen impressions, we must look again at the actual work. The whole print is extremely delicately executed. There is nothing heavy or forceful about it, irrespective of the strong contrasts between light and shade. Even the areas of intense brightness and profound darkness are bound together by a very subtly graded middle tone. Whether in etching, drypoint or burin, the lines are fine, narrow and mostly quite shallow, which lends the whole image the smooth appearance of a meticulously executed painting or a mezzotint, a printing technique which had only been invented in 1642. It is for this very nuanced, tonal quality that The Hundred Guilder Print has been called Rembrandt’s most ‘painterly’ print. It is a manner of printmaking he had perfected only a year earlier, in the portrait of Jan Six (see lot 16). In early impressions, this is a work – like The Hundred Guilder Print - of almost inconceivable subtlety and elegance. Yet therein lay the problem with both plates: once the tiny touches of drypoint, the most delicate lines of engraving, the fine but very dense cross-hatching in the darkest areas started to wear and the middle-tones to disappear, the image began to fall apart, to look patchy and discordant.
It is at this point that an observation by Barbara Welzel is of great relevance: ‘One of the strands of tradition to which research has as yet paid too little attention constantly describes the Hundred Guilder Print as extraordinarily rare’ (see Bevers et al., p. 244). The earliest commentators, including Meyssens quoted at the beginning of this note, all stressed the rarity of the print. With over one hundred second-state impressions recorded by Hinterding and Rutgers in public collections alone, the print as such can by no means be described as very rare. What these 17th-century texts reveal is that Rembrandt himself must have pulled only a small number of impressions himself, of both the first and second states, simply because the plate did not yield many prints of high quality. The present example, printed on precious Japan paper, undoubtedly comes from this very first print-run of the second state.
It is entirely within Rembrandt’s character and development as an artist - once he had abandoned the concept of printmaking in the style of Rubens’ workshop and embraced etching as means of expression rather than a commercial enterprise - to make a print of the greatest aspiration, complication and refinement, just because he could and wanted to: for himself, for friends, colleagues, patrons and important collectors.
It is of course true that in The Hundred Guilder Print we find echoes of earlier works – prints as well as painted works, such as the great grisaille of the Sermon of Saint John the Baptist of 1634-1635, today at the Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister in Berlin. It may in fact have been this small oil sketch which gave Rembrandt the initial idea for a print of Christ preaching, a subject which he seems to have invented with this etching. From this, however, it cannot be inferred that these two works were begun concurrently or even successively. Rather than labouring for years over a challenge he had set himself, and then struggling to complete it, it seems far more likely that Rembrandt, aged around forty, set out to make a masterpiece, the culmination of nearly twenty years of experience and experimentation as a printmaker, and threw everything at it. We know that he had explored the effects of light and shade, both subtle and bold; that he had understood that intense contrasts create tension and drama; that unfinished passages engage the viewer and thereby enlivened a scene; that brevity means caricature and attention to detail inspires empathy. By then he had mastered the different techniques of working with acid, the needle and the burin, and knew how to combine them for best effect. All this he did, at once and on a single large plate, in The Hundred Guilder Print. Barbara Welzel came to just this conclusion when she wrote that ‘The variety of methods in print-making should not, in this case, be understood to indicate that Rembrandt evaluated the work over several years, but rather as a record of Rembrandt’s reference to his own oeuvre – a deliberate display of virtuosity’ (B. Welzel, in: Bevers et al., p. 245). And yet, we should not forget that the artist did not live in secular times. The Hundred Guilder Print must have been a highly important work for Rembrandt not just artistically, but spiritually: an attempt to depict Christ as he saw Him.