December 2011

Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC, Features Prints by Rembrandt

The Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC, is presenting the exhibit, Rembrandt: The Printmaker, on view through Jan. 22, 2012.

Rembrandt is one of the few great artists whose achievement as a printmaker matches what he accomplished as a painter. In his own lifetime one large etching, Christ Preaching, acquired the nickname “The Hundred Guilder Print” because of the extravagant price it had fetched at a sale.

Unfortunately, because of his fame as a printmaker, the plates Rembrandt created were not only printed in his lifetime but reprinted long after his death. Many of the so-called “Rembrandt etchings” that we see today were printed from plates so worn that the prints give no idea of what Rembrandt actually intended.

A recent study of the thirty-seven Rembrandt prints in the Museum’s collection has identified just eleven that truly represent the quality of his work as a printmaker. They are shown here, together with a copy of the Hundred Guilder Print made by the French etcher Léopold Flameng in 1873.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 919/966-5736 or visit (http://www.ackland.org/index.htm).

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