Old Man with a Flowing Beard: Bust

×

Send Inquiry for Old Man with a Flowing Beard: Bust

Unauthorized Inquiry

500 characters remaining

Send me a copy

Save my Name and Email in this browser for my next Inquiry/Quote Request

I allow the Site owner to contact me via email/phone to discuss this Inquiry. (If you want to know more about the way this site handles the data, then please go through our privacy policy)

Inquiry email sent successfully!

An original Rembrandt Van Rijn etching.

1631

Original etching printed in black ink on laid paper

Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated in the plate upper left RHL 1631 (extremely faint).

A delicate but superb 17th century/lifetime impression of Bartsch, Usticke and New Hollstein’s second and final state of this rare etching (characterized by G.W. Nowell-Usticke in his 1967 catalogue Rembrandt’s Etchings: States and Values as “a very scarce small plate”, and assigned his scarcity rating of “RR-” [50-75 impressions extant in that year]), printed after the addition of the irregular, scribbled lines above the shadow in the left margin, and the diagonal cross-hatching to the shadow itself.

Catalog: Bartsch 315 ii/ii; Hind 48; Biorklund-Barnard 31-F; Usticke 315 ii/ii; New Hollstein 83 ii/ii.

Portraits occupy an important place in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. Even in his Leiden days he was already making studies of old men and women, for which his own parents would also doubtless have posed. The prints were probably not intended to be substantive works of art but were rather Rembrandt’s way of practicing ways of depicting a range of facial expressions. Between 1633 and 1664 Rembrandt made about twenty portrait etchings. Most of them were not executed for commercial publication as prints or book illustrations, but were private prints made for personal reasons. This etching was probably made from life or from one of the drawings in red chalk that Rembrtandt made of old bearded men between 1630 and 1633.