Rembrandt at The British Museum, London

Rembrandt The Printmaker
The British Museum, London
25 January - 8 April 2001

Rembrandt was the most original printmaker of all time. In no less than 300 etchings he covered the full range of styles and subjects for which he is celebrated as a painter and draughtsman, including self-portraits, scenes from the Bible, vignettes of everyday life and character studies. The well-known Hundred Guilder Print, the Three Trees and the Three Crosses are among his most extraordinary creations. Famously experimental, he often reworked and scratched at his copper plates to improve and extend their expressive power. The results can look startlingly modern and continue to inspire artists today. 

Rembrandt's prints have been avidly collected since the day they were made and over the past two centuries the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have built up the greatest of all collections of these famous rarities. This major loan exhibition, the most ambitious display of Rembrandt's prints ever mounted, will present for the first time the highlights of both collections to provide a fully representative panorama of Rembrandt's achievements as a printmaker, from their beginnings in the second half of the 1620s until his death forty years later. Organised jointly with the Rijksmuseum and curated by leading authorities in current Rembrandt scholarship, the exhibition will show almost 200 impressions of these masterpieces of western art.

The exhibition is also the first to present the results of important new areas of research that have opened up in recent years, allowing us not only to follow the progress of Rembrandt's work on each etching, but also to determine when he revised the images. Many of his etchings can now be dated more exactly, and individual states of his prints are now precisely datable for the first time. The role played by Rembrandt's preparatory drawings and related oil-sketches, several of which are included from collections in Europe and America, is also now better understood. Providing an intimate glimpse into Rembrandt's working methods and a new understanding of his conception of his print oeuvre, these fresh insights will be presented to a wider public for the first time. 

A richly illustrated catalogue, Rembrandt the Printmaker, will accompany the exhibition, with 90 colour and 420 black-and-white illustrations (384pp.), by Erik Hinterding (University of Utrecht), Ger Luijten (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) and Martin Royalton-Kisch (British Museum), with contributions by Marijn Schapelhouman, Peter Schatborn (both Rijksmuseum) and Ernst van de Wetering (Head of the Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam). Exhibition Price £45 (hardback).

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Prints and Drawings Gallery
Museum's Website: www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk