“In a real and delightful way, this most famous of artists remains to be discovered in the same manner that he palpably anticipated – picture by picture, one viewer at a time. Rembrandt is in the details.”

Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker, 11/10/03

New Yorker critic Schjeldahl refers here to his delight on rediscovering Rembrandt in a 2003 show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Now we at the NMA have a chance to rediscover Rembrandt in a new show from Boston, Rembrandt: The Embrace of Darkness and Light, with the same curator, Dr. Cliff Ackley. We have seen Rembrandt etchings here before, but have never had the chance to see the full range of his genius in this medium. The show also includes work from Italian, Dutch, and German artists who preceded, influenced, or collaborated with Rembrandt.

So what does it mean to say that “Rembrandt is in the details”? A. Hyatt Mayor, an emeritus curator of prints at the Met, said that “Rembrandt rejected nothing human”. The critic Hilton Kramer wrote that Rembrandt “never idealized his subjects”, that he had “unflinching loyalty to the actualities of the human condition”. So when we look at any of Rembrandt’s deeply felt religious etchings, we see beggars and peasants, mothers and babies, children playing, characters in exotic dress or in rags, and dogs being dogs. And each one is worthy of our attention. Rembrandt collected and considered expressions and gestures: “How does a mother hold her child? How do people look when they’re really listening? How heavy is a lifeless body? Where does a garter leave a mark on a fleshy calf?” He was an obsessive collector of objects, too -- anything beautiful or rare. Thanks to his wife Saskia he was able to amass a huge collection of costumes, weapons, sculpture, animal specimens and, most importantly, etchings, engravings and woodcuts from other artists. It was an accepted practice at that time for artists to study and copy other artists’ work. So we’ll see in this show, for example, a Durer woodcut of Christ Driving the Moneylenders from the Temple next to Rembrandt’s etching of the same subject. He has used Durer’s figure of Christ in an emotional composition that is totally new, completely his own. In other examples, he has transformed ethereal Italian madonnas into flesh and blood 17th Century Dutch mothers.

After all, etchings and engravings were the only accessible form of ‘media’ at that time. Regular people could see and buy them. Here were the old familiar Bible stories, retold by a master storyteller, with faces and clothes you could see on the streets of Amsterdam. A black and white etching, in Rembrandt’s hands, could make you feel the weather, see the colors, and delight in the tiny figures working in the background.

If we take a long close look at the two versions of The Three Crosses, we can see that Rembrandt has used his unsurpassed skill in drypoint to populate this scene with every type of character, good and bad. But he wasn’t satisfied, and worked through several states until the fourth, when he burnished out some characters, and darkened the composition . But he added some characters too. One of them sits up straight on his horse wearing an odd hat taken directly from a Pisanello medal (also in the show!). Did Rembrandt once own one of those medals? What pleasure he took in these details! And now the pleasure is ours.