Rembrandt is best known for his shadowy paintings. His 1642 canvas The Night Watch is a masterclass in dynamic composition, while the self-portraits he made throughout his life chart his aging likeness alongside his developing aesthetic. Yet it’s the artist’s smaller scale, black-and white etchings that highlight the exactitude of Rembrandt’s visions, and reveal how he constructed shadow, mark by individual mark.
For the first time, a trove of the artist’s etchings are going on view in the United States, in a traveling showcase organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and Amsterdam’s Rembrandt House Museum. Emphasizing the Dutch master’s groundbreaking printmaking process, “Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum” has opened at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art with works that encourage slow looking in the age of the quick digital scroll.
Rembrandt van Rijn, (c. 1642). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
“While we expect many visitors to the exhibition to arrive with some degree of familiarity with Rembrandt,” H. Alexander Rich, president and CEO of the Gibbes Museum, said in a statement, “the show—with its focus on his etchings—offers fresh, unexpected, and exciting insight into aspects of Rembrandt’s life, career, and creative output that we may think about less often.”
Etching was a relatively new form of printmaking in Rembrandt’s time. The process required the artist to draw on wax applied atop copper plates, drop them in acid, coat them in ink, then press them to paper on which the print would appear. He often combined the technique with drypoint, working directly on the metal and forgoing the acid step in order to create softer lines. The artist’s commingling of the forms produced marks that were both durable and delicate, a contrast that paralleled Rembrandt’s handling of shadow and light.
Rembrandt van Rijn, (1651). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The etchings on view in “Masterpieces in Black and White” range in subject matter from self-portraits to Biblical studies and bucolic Dutch landscapes that contributed to what Rich called “that now-collective vision of the Netherlands.”
Rembrandt’s 1641 print Windmill, for example, features the titular apparatus in precise detail. The artist captured every bar on the sails’ lattice framework, every rung on the ladders leading up to the entryways. Dense crosshatchings place one side of the windmill in deep shadow, and two dark windows look like architectural eyes; under Rembrandt’s hand, the windmill becomes anthropomorphized, given as much personality as any of his self-portraits. Exhibition curator Epco Runia, head of collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, noted in press materials how “each of Rembrandt’s prints is a work of art in its own right.”
Rembrandt van Rijn, (1641). Photo courtsy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The exhibition includes other objects and artworks to allow for greater scrutiny and deeper context. Two copperplates appear alongside the etchings they helped produce. Magnifying glasses are available “for audiences to study each and every etched mark and decision Rembrandt made to produce these prints,” Rich said. Fourteen works by 19th- and 20th-century artists, including Pablo Picasso and James McNeil Whistler, suggest Rembrandt’s crucial influence on later generations.
Towards the end of his life, according to the exhibition brochure, Rembrandt “began experimenting with freer lines and dark shadows on different types of paper, and explored working the plates extensively to create night scenes.” The artist, then, approached darkness and finality with the same open, omnivorous spirit and capacity for metaphor that characterize his entire oeuvre. As the artist’s body declined, etching preserved every last trace.
Rembrandt van Rijn, (1652). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The show marks the Rembrandt House Museum’s first collaboration with both the AFA and the Gibbes Museum of Art. Following its stop in Charleston, the exhibition is set to travel to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, in February 2026, then the Naples Art Institute in Florida in October 2026.
The AFA’s partnerships with these museums, the organization’s director and CEO Pauline Forlenza said in a statement, “will allow us to bring these momentous etchings out of the Netherlands for the first time as a collection, for the benefit of audiences in the United States so that they can experience Rembrandt’s work directly.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
