Exploring Rembrandt’s Etchings at the Taft Museum of Art

Photograph courtesy Taft Museum of Art

In February, the Taft Museum of Art welcomed a selection of prints created by world-renowned 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. On loan from the Rembrandt House Museum in his hometown of Amsterdam, Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White includes more than nearly 50 etchings made of the acclaimed artist’s subjects. The works are small in scale, most only a few inches in length and width, and the Taft provides magnifying glasses to visitors to be able to distinguish the intricate lines and details within each piece.

Head of Collections at the Rembrandt House Museum and Exhibition Curator Epco Runia shares how this collection ended up at the Taft Museum, how guests can engage with the art, and what the etchings tell us about Rembrandt’s storied artistic career.

Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White is on display at the Taft through May 17.

How did you come to curate this exhibition?

I’m head of collections and research at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, and these prints belong to our collection. We thought it might be nice to have a selection of some [50 of his total] 300 of the Rembrandt prints travel to the United States and especially here at the Taft Museum, [which is a] great venue and a great building to show these beautiful prints.

How did you choose the prints and etchings?

What we wanted to tell with this exhibition is how Rembrandt is interested in different kinds of subjects. There are a few things like light and dark, which he is very famous for, that he researched in his prints, and we thought it might be nice to show what these topics were as an artist in terms of his artistic goals. In that way, to show that these prints aren’t just reproductions but are real artworks in themselves.

How do you want people to interact with the exhibits?

I love that people can use the magnifying glasses because these prints are small, and in black and white it might be difficult to have a real good look at them, so the magnifying glass helps a lot to see all the details and see how Rembrandt made the image. That’s one of the nice things about prints of Rembrandt’s—you can also always see the lines and how he’s building up these lines to create light or dark, and in that way with the magnifying glass it’s best to be seen. But also because there are always one or two funny details in every print Rembrandt makes, because he was a little bit of a witty artist.