The Entombment

This impression of The Entombment is arguably the most extreme and radical work of manual printmaking, not just in Rembrandt’s oeuvre but in the history of Western Art. More than any other of his plates, The Entombment has been the object of his experimental approach to printmaking in the later years. Not only did he alter the plate drastically between the first and the second state, he also chose different supports - from European paper to Chinese and Japanese papers to vellum – from one impression to another, and manipulated each pull by leaving varying degrees of plate tone and wiping the plate tone selectively to modify the illumination and pick out different highlights. Of the later states, virtually no two impressions look the same, as Christopher White explained: ‘…the dark metamorphoses offer a highly personal vision employing all the chance methods at an artist’s command, with each impression as unique as a monotype.’ (White, 1999, p. 95) This is nowhere more apparent than in the present example, printed with an almost solid black plate tone onto vellum. Rembrandt confronts the viewer with an image of almost impenetrable darkness, out of which only the most shadowy figures emerge at lower right, as if lit by the faintest light of a lantern. Most of the underlying composition, surroundings as well as figures, is completely obliterated and inscrutable. In this particular impression, one of only a handful printed with this amount of tone and on vellum, Rembrandt went even further in his manipulation of the process: he seems to have deliberately rolled the print through the press twice. As we can see at the lower left plate corner, the plate slightly slipped or was purposefully moved for the second pass, which resulted in the double-printing of some lines, in particular the legs and torso of the dead Christ. Whether the plate was removed from the sheet in order to partially re-ink or wipe it between the two printings is impossible to determine. Whatever the exact process employed, the effect of the double-printing further heightens the sense of uncertainty of vision into which the viewer is thrown and adds an uncanny notion of movement and temporality to the scene.

Within the biblical narrative, The Entombment follows directly on from the Descent from the Cross by Torchlight (see lot 49). Joseph of Arimathea has brought the dead Christ to his own tomb, in the first state or lighter impressions of the later states visible as a vaulted cave or chapel, where the body is now being lowered into the grave.

The first state is in pure etching, the shading and modelling of the space and the figures rendered in regularly and openly spaced hatchings, with strong lines of equal weight. Although darkness and light are suggested, the whole scene is clearly discernible. We see Joseph of Arimathea standing at left above the sunken grave, the Virgin is sitting to his feet, her hands clasped in sorrow, a group of other grieving women is huddled behind her. Three men are lowering the body into the grave, a fourth one has climbed down to support it from below. The light seems to come from a lamp covered by the foremost figure – or perhaps is emanating from the dead Christ Himself. Above this mournful scene – pushed into the lower left corner of the image, thereby reflecting the act of the entombment – we see the arch of the cavern, with two skulls resting on a ledge. Behind this gruesome memento mori, the space recedes into darkness. Already in the second state Rembrandt obscured the composition considerably with dense hatching in drypoint and engraving, turning it into a truly nocturnal scene, and made it even darker in the subsequent states. The present example demonstrates perfectly what interested Rembrandt in his experiments with this plate - to see how far he could go in the depiction of darkness - and that he was willing to take it to the edge of the possibilities of printmaking.