Rembrandt van Rijn
2019 marks the 350th anniversary of the death of the outstanding artist Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669). In this anniversary year, the Graphic Collection and the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna are presenting a showcase exhibition of Rembrandt’s portraits, in particular those with age and aging as a theme. Thanks to the Academy, we can present today's marvelous etching!
Rembrandt’s view of the human body departed radically from the ideal of beauty in the art academies of his day. Like no other artist of his era, in new variations down the years he repeatedly recorded his own process of aging for posterity, engraving as it were his lifelines in the printing plates. Yet quite aside from his self-portraits, his oeuvre of prints has an exceptional number of works exploring age and its attributes, from physical frailty to social marginalization. In his unadorned and authentic studies of old faces and bodies, of cripples and beggars, he shows the downside of the Golden Age in 17th-century Dutch painting.
His figural and physiognomic studies are also an expression of his strong interest in the portrait form. In contrast to paintings in 17th-century Holland, affordable etchings of character heads appealed to middle-class collectors as edifying and to other artists as welcome objects of study. Rembrandt too varied, time and again, both his own models and those from other artists, and reused them in other contexts.
Rembrandt revolutionized printmaking. The first artist to exploit the medium creatively, he reworked his printing plates and experimented with hatching, etching techniques, and fine color graduations. In this way, he enabled the beholder to follow the compositional process—one reason for today’s continuing fascination with Rembrandt’s visual language, which at times seems so surprisingly modern.
P.S. See here one of the most beautiful portraits created by Rembrandt with so much love. It is a depiction of his wife Saskia as Flora. <3