Virtuosity and Imagination: Rembrandt Etchings from the Collection

From 9 September 2017 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is presenting more than sixty of Rembrandt’s finest prints. After a recent restoration and conservation project, this special selection of landscape prints, genre scenes, portraits, self-portraits and religious scenes will be exhibited for the first time. Highlights include 'Landscape with Three Gabled Cottages Beside a Road’, 'St Jerome by a Pollard Willow' and 'The Three Crosses', one of his most experimental works.

In an exhibition entitled Virtuosity and Imagination: Rembrandt Etchings from Boijmans’s Collection, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will show more than eighty objects, including sixty of Rembrandt’s finest prints. There will also be reprints and copies of his work, as well as prints that were a source of inspiration for him. Rembrandt’s prints are exceptional in their spontaneous line, extraordinary handling of light and extensive use of drypoint.

During his lifetime Rembrandt owed his renown in much of Europe chiefly to his prints, which were more widely accessible than his paintings and drawings. The name of just one of his masterpieces – the Hundred Guilder Print – proves how popular his work was among the collectors of his time. It was just before his twentieth birthday that Rembrandt first made an etching. Throughout his life he built up a large oeuvre of more than three hundred prints. As a printmaker he wanted to measure up to the greats of the past – artists like Lucas van Leyden and Albrecht Dürer.