Jan Antonides van der Linden

This is a fine and very pleasing impression of Rembrandt's last print, created four years after he had stopped making prints in 1661 with his final valiant work the great Woman with the Arrow (B. 202; New Holl. 313). The present print shows the medical professor Jan Antonides van der Linden (1609-1664) and was intended as a frontispiece to his posthumously published version of the writings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. As the story goes, Rembrandt's son Titus had bumped into the publisher and, upon hearing that an engraved portrait of van der Linden was needed, recommended his father, probably in the hope of bringing him back into business. Titus seems to have glossed over the fact that his father was an etcher, not an engraver. The commission was thus bound to fail from the beginning, as Rembrandt made the print in the way he knew and had always done, in a mixed technique of etching, engraving and drypoint. The publisher must have realised that Rembrandt's plate would not last for a large print-run, and it was never included in the book. Rembrandt however must have hoped he would, as he left a large blank margin on the plate below the portrait to be engraved with text. In the present impression, this border has been trimmed off.

The print was to be based on a painted portrait by Abraham van den Tempel (1622⁄23-1672), which may explain why the portrait does not quite look like 'a Rembrandt', although he still mastered the play of light on the garments and face as he always had - effects which can only be appreciated in early impressions, such as the present one: the face, hands and the background were etched in a very sensitive, wispy manner, which wore very quickly. The unusual placement of the professor standing in a landscape may have been a reference to his role as the founder of the botanical gardens at the university of Franeker, but also points to a burgeoning fashion in outdoor portraits.