Etching: Rembrandt's Legacy

The second showing of the exhibition in Newcastle in 2024 is shown below.

photography Christopher Dewar

PDF of catalogue Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy is available on ResearchGate.

Follow this link to all works in the Rembrandt's Legacy exhibition

Follow this link to a comprehensive supplement to the catalogue for the exhibition. Importantly this essay uses works from the exhibition to clarify the distinction between reproductive prints, illustrations and and independent prints made by artists

Supplement to the catalogue: The seventeenth-century print trade in europe

william baillie and rembrandt

Follow this link to details on the eighteenth-century Rembrandt promoter William Baillie who features in Gillrays print in the exhibition.

Sequence of work showing the early development of woodcuts (by Durer and his Circle and the competition with copper engraving, demonstrated by Marcantonio Raimondi’s (ca. 1480 - 1534), engraved copies of Durer, adjacent to a Durer woodblock. The final work is an engraved Blazon of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke by Adriaen Collaert (1560-1618) from 1614. This sequence contains no etchings.

Further installation shots of Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy

Install looking towards the Potentially Symbolic Objects exhibition

WILLEM SWIDDE (1661 - 1697) Six Landscapes 1676

Below; views of the long side gallery.

Newcastle variant of exhibition

"Etching: Rembrandt's Legacy" and the cojoined Potentially Symbolic Objects were later shown in Newcastle, NSW at Watt Space in 2024 (19 Jan. 1 March). Although there were significant differences in the layout at Watt Space, with one exception, the works were the same.

Watt Space is in Northumberland House Cnr King and Auckland Streets Newcastle NSW 2300, Australia and is the city adjunct to the main University Art Museum on the Campus at Callaghan

Etching has always had an alluring, although slightly problematic, reputation. It could be said that etching has always had the reputation that saxophone playing had in the early Jazz-age in the twentieth century. Something to steer your children away from. For artists, the challenge is associated with the high-risk, high-return or demanding nature of the medium, yet paradoxically it remains one of the few non-commercial printmaking mediums known to the general public as a signifier of an original print distinctive from a print as a reproduction of a painting. This exhibition aims to evoke, as much as explicitly explain, the mystique surrounding etching as a primary inventive image-making medium, examining its enduring appeal.

The significance of etching in Rembrandt’s career has been recognized in recent times, as evidenced by the major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in the second half of 2023. Titled “Rembrandt: True to Life,” that exhibition presented over 100 of his etchings, emphasizing the importance of printmaking as a central aspect of his creative thinking. This revelation, though new to some, has long been acknowledged among printmakers. In fact, William M. Ivins, a renowned twentieth-century authority, once proclaimed Rembrandt as “the patron saint of non-commercial etchers,” a significant tribute given that it was made seventy years ago in less secular times.

This exhibition Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy brought together selected Rembrandt etchings and prints by his contemporaries to demonstrate the nature of his innovative contributions to the art of etching as an independent medium. Alongside Rembrandt’s works, the exhibition also showcases later historical examples by esteemed master printmakers such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Beckmann. These works collectively illuminate the enduring attraction of etching for artists and collectors from Rembrandt’s time to the present day.