In one of life's cute little ironies, I first learned of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn's role as an innovator of the graphic arts at the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, about which I wrote in a previous post.  Seeing his etching alongside the graphic works of other world famous artists who worked in the centuries after his death, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Warhol, and Soto, expanded my knowledge of his work.  Previously, I had thought of the master as merely the creator of oil paintings, such as that national treasure of the Netherlands, Nachtwacht, which I saw years ago at the Rijksmuseum.

So I could not believe my luck when I got to Museum het Rembrandthuis last month and found that, in addition to the permanent display of the great artist's home restored and furnished as it would have been when he lived there in the early 1600s, the temporary exhibition was of his engravings, with a focus on the techniques he used to advance the field of graphic art.

The museum is entered through the basement of the adjacent building, which opens into the basement of the house itself, which contains the kitchen/servants quarters.  Ascending a typically steep Amsterdam staircase leads to the entrance hall, where Rembrandt displayed paintings for sale and through which visitors entered.  The anteroom to the left as one entered the front door is where he received guests with a glass of chilled wine to discuss business.  The walls here, too, are covered now, as they were then, with 17th century paintings, although today the works are not for sale.

Just behind this room, and opposite the staircase, lies the room where Rembrandt's press was, and where he hung his etchings up to dry.  The room at the rear of the first floor, known as the salon, was what today we would call his bedroom, and contains, as it did when the great master slept there, a box bed, massive fireplace, and, again, a number of important oil paintings.

Upstairs are only two rooms, the large studio and the 'cabinet,' which is actually a large room, perhaps akin to a massive modern-day walk-in closet, where Rembrandt stored a vast collection of rare items and objects d'art, including seashells, globes, busts, corals, animal parts, weapons, glassware and other artifacts.  The room also housed his albums of art which contained more than 8000 prints and other works.

The studio, the largest room in the house, provides constant light during the day from the bank of north-facing windows which covers the entire front wall.  In addition to space for Rembrandt to create his masterpieces, the studio also contained space for assistants to prepare his paints and canvases, as well as plaster casts and pieces of armor used by the master and his pupils as models.

Continuing further upstairs, and then progressing back down into the adjacent building takes visitors through the gallery space for temporary exhibitions.  At the time of my visit, the galleries contained a number of Rembrandt prints, often in more than one 'state' as well as the copper plates used to produce them.

These works were chosen to highlight the different techniques Rembrandt used to produce the art which led to his being regarded as perhaps the greatest producer of etchings of all time.  Some of the techniques were quite simple, such as making counterproofs by laying clean sheets of paper onto fresh prints to make a reverse of the print, therefore exactly copying the plate, producing an image to use for comparison when making corrections.

Others were much more complicated, such as varying the etching time on different areas of the plate.  This effects the amount of reaction that takes place between the copper and the solvent used to etch it, creating effects such as the seemingly different lighting conditions throughout the scene in Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael from 1637.

Rembrandt even used effects which would normally be considered mistakes to create his prints, as can be seen in his 1633 work The Flight to Egypt, during the etching of which bubbles in the acid bath were allowed to remain, sticking to the plate and preventing the acid from reaching certain parts, creating the stars in the nighttime sky.

The collection also showed how his choice of bases for the prints he made.  For example, side by side versions of St. Jerome in an Italian Landscape (c. 1654) printed on Japanese and European paper show how the Japanese version allows the ink to bleed, permitting distinct lines to better depict subtle shading.  Also, versions of Nebuchadnezzar's Dream on European paper as well as vellum show how the latter shrinks and distorts over the centuries, making it less than ideal for prints meant to stand the test of time despite its luminous sheen.

Before my visit to el Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, I might have been disappointed to pay a small fortune in increasingly worthless American dollars to visit a museum devoted to Rembrandt and see only one of his paintings (his 1635 Minerva hangs in the entrance hall).  Having seen the master's work in its rightful place in the pantheon of great graphic art, however, I could have appreciated nothing more than seeing the techniques he used and the works they produced.  After all, the Nightwatch is always on display just across town.

Joshua C. Robinson

jrobinson@riseup.net