How Sam Josefowitz assembled the finest collection of Rembrandt prints in private hands

The inspiration to collect prints by Rembrandt — ultimately resulting in the finest and most comprehensive private collection of the 20th century — came to Sam Josefowitz in rather unlikely circumstances. Taking a flight from Paris to Geneva in 1969, Josefowitz happened to strike up a conversation with the stranger in the seat next to him: Ira Gale, an American prints dealer.

Within 10 minutes, Gale had pulled out from his briefcase a whole album’s worth of Old Master prints. ‘I invited Ira to come to my home [in Lausanne] for lunch the next day,’ Josefowitz recalled shortly before his death in 2015. ‘We spent several hours looking at his prints, and talking about Old Master prints, their availability and their beauty. Before he left, I had purchased… one of his Rembrandt etchings.’

At that stage of his life — he was in his late forties, running a successful mail-order book and music business — Josefowitz’s collecting interests lay chiefly in the art of the Pont-Aven painters, who had operated in that Breton town towards the end of the 19th century.

His purchase of the Rembrandt etching from Gale, however, heralded a significant new direction: over the following four decades, Josefowitz would acquire more than 270 prints by the Dutchman, building a collection that is without equal in the depth, quality and rarity of its holdings.

On 5 December 2024, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn — Part II will be offered at Christie’s in London, following the enormous success of Part I in December 2023.

Rembrandt was born in the town of Leiden in 1606. He started his printmaking career at the age of 19, at first producing prints of mostly modest size and subject matter: small sketches of peasants and beggars as well as so-called ‘tronies’, studies of facial features and expressions.

These early years were a period of flexing his artistic muscles and perfecting his craft. His efforts paid off. By the time Rembrandt settled in Amsterdam around 1634, he had mastered the technique of etching and yet continued to explore its possibilities.

Through the use of different patterns of hatching, and variations in the thickness of his lines, he depicted all manner of scenes with convincing spatial arrangements, light and shade, facial expressions and the sense of figures in motion. His motifs now ranged from the dramatic set piece of Christ before Pilate, with its finely wrought figures immersed in a crowded tableau, to his largest female portrait, known as ‘The Great Jewish Bride’. Both prints date from 1635.

The young Rembrandt did not lack ambition and soon felt confident enough to compare himself to the great artists of the Italian Renaissance. In his Self-Portrait leaning on a Stone Sill of 1639, he emulated Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (today found in the Louvre). This is the largest of the 31 self-portraits Rembrandt produced in print across his career, and the Dutchman depicts himself in sumptuous dress, with the luxurious folds of his sleeve draped over the wall in the foreground — in stark contrast to an earlier self-portrait in disguise, the Beggar seated on a Bank of 1630 (see above).

From the 1640s, Rembrandt expanded his repertoire of genres to include landscape etchings, with ‘The Three Trees’ (1643) being one of the most celebrated and sought-after of all his prints. It is a technical tour de force, using all the methods at his disposal — etching, drypoint, engraving and sulphur tinting — to create astonishing weather effects in a chiaroscuro reminiscent of his finest paintings. To understand the stylistic and technical range within Rembrandt’s printed oeuvre, it is fascinating to compare the highly finished and detailed tableau of ‘The Three Trees’ with one of his sparsest and seemingly most spontaneous landscape etchings, The Bridge at Klein Kostverloren on the Amstel (‘Six’s Bridge’).

The metropolitan milieu of Amsterdam, filled as it was with a sizeable circle of print connoisseurs, undoubtedly fed Rembrandt’s innate curiosity and desire to experiment as a printmaker. He began to work with unusual supports, for instance, printing on Oriental papers and vellum rather than European paper. These materials were less absorbent, causing the ink to sit on the surface, thereby lending the images an ethereal, almost liquid appearance.

For the impression of Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside her (1658) in the Josefowitz Collection, Rembrandt used a sheet of greyish-brown Japan paper to create the warm and intimate atmosphere of a dimly lit room, and the smooth, silken surface of the paper adds a gentle sheen to the image, suggestive of both the texture of her skin and of the play of the soft light on her body.

Not only did Rembrandt experiment with different papers, he was also known to rework certain designs over time, adding or subtracting details on his plates, thus modifying the composition of his prints from state to state. A prime example is Jan Lutma, Goldsmith (1656): an impression of this portrait in the second/third state printed on so-called oatmeal paper is being offered in the upcoming auction. In the first state, Rembrandt had yet to add a large window behind his sitter.

To produce an etching, a copper plate is covered with a wax and resin ground, into which the artist scratches with a needle. It is then dipped in acid, which ‘bites out’ the desired lines. In drypoint, by contrast, a needle is used to scratch the image directly into the copper plate. Rembrandt seems to have been particularly fond of the dark, soft and velvety lines that drypoint offers, and from around 1650 he began to employ this method more extensively.

Over a period of two years, between 1653 and 1655, Rembrandt worked on the two largest prints of his career, executed solely in drypoint: Christ crucified between the two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’ and Christ presented to the People (‘Ecce Homo’). Among the most widely admired prints in art history, these two plates show the Dutchman at his most ambitious and daring.

In both Christ crucified between the two Thieves: ‘The Three Crosses’ and Christ presented to the People (‘Ecce Homo’), Rembrandt rejected a panoramic composition in favour of a viewpoint much closer to the central scene. In Christ presented to the People we thereby become almost complicit in this critical event, as Pontius Pilate asks the people of Jerusalem whether Jesus should be spared, not allowing us to observe the judgement from a comfortable distance.

If ‘The Three Crosses’ is more dynamic, almost cinematic in effect, this composition is more theatrical: the stage is set, and the tragedy of Jesus’s fate unfolds slowly and inevitably. Christ stands on a raised terrace before Pilate’s palace, barefoot and dressed only in a loincloth, his hands tied together in front of him. Pilate, sporting a turban, large cloak and long staff, stands to the left. The governor points at Christ with a questioning gesture, as if asking the onlookers: ‘What shall I do with him?’

‘The Three Crosses’ is offered in a very fine, rich and dark impression of the fourth state, after Rembrandt had radically altered the composition on the printing plate by obscuring much of the scene, as it was previously visible, with hard drypoint lines. The plate of ‘Ecce Homo’ was subject of a similar transformation. The print included here is an impression after Rembrandt obliterated the crowd standing in front of the terrace and replaced it with two dark and mysterious archways. In both cases, he not only altered the image, but added another layer of meaning and expression to the scene.

In the case of ‘The Three Crosses’, the re-working of the plate meant a further concentration on the figure of Christ on the Cross, at the expense of narrative detail. Rembrandt throws us into the midst of the Crucifixion at the moment of greatest drama, as the sky suddenly darkens and the earth trembles. Everything is in turmoil, and Rembrandt depicts the chaotic scene with hard, deep drypoint lines and glittering highlights. Rembrandt’s almost violent treatment of the plate echoes the brutality of the event and adds a sense of movement and immediacy, invoking a traumatic experience. According to the art historian James Ganz, ‘the death of Christ on the cross has never been depicted with such graphic intensity or raw expressive force’.

Vincent van Gogh once referred to Rembrandt as a ‘magician’, and more than four centuries after his first etching, his prints are as astounding and moving as they were at the time. Ever since they were made, interest in and demand for Rembrandt’s prints has never dimmed, and many of his finest works in the medium are now in great museum collections around the world. It is testament to Sam Josefowitz’s discernment and determination that he was able to acquire this extraordinary, incomparable ensemble — a collection which, as he said in 2011, ‘absorbed and enriched my life in so many ways’.

Explore art from antiquity to the 21st century at Classic Week, 26 November to 12 December 2024 at Christie’s in London. On view from 29 November