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Rembrandt Etchings from the Collection of D.A.
Rovinsky in the State Hermitage The exhibition which has opened in the Nicholas hall of the Winter Palace (room N 191) presents 340 works of the great 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt. This is the first time that Russia's largest collection, indeed one of the world's largest collections of Rembrandt etchings, is being put on display. The collection was given to the Hermitage in 1897 in accordance with the testament of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Rovinsky. and is one of the largest private collections of Rembrandt's works. The exhibition is dedicated to the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, which is being celebrated in 2006, and also to the outstanding collector and art historian, A.D. Rovinsky. It is a tribute to his memory that his unique collection was preserved intact. The exhibition presents the etchings which Rovinsky researched at the end of the 19th century and attributed to Rembrandt. Printed in Leiden and in Amsterdam, they include early portraits of his mother and self-portraits from the 1620s as well as the last etching which the artist did, in 1665, a portrait of Jan van der Linden. Rembrandt's artistic legacy consists of around 500 paintings, more than 1,000 drawings and nearly 300 etchings. His full name was Rembrandt Harmenszoon (son of Harmen) van Rijn and he was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, which was the second largest city in Holland. As an engraver, Rembrandt was a phenomenon without parallel in the history of art: he created more than 300 self-portraits, religious compositions, portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, nudes, sketches of the poor and griffons. The technique of engraving which Rembrandt developed was so complex that with rare exceptions attempts to copy or use his methods only evoke pity. As in his paintings, light was the main thing in Rembrandt's etchings. Lines were subordinated to light, as was the technique of engraving and the impossible experiments which, as it turned out, could not be repeated by others. Many of his experiments were long considered to be traces of carelessness or forgetfulness of the master. But each movement of the engraver was precise and thought through For that reason precisely the first, or "proof" impressions which Rembrandt took from the plates have the quality of independent works of art. The sequence of these impressions in which the artist made successive changes is seen in the so-called states (the numbers of which can be as many as 12). To see them side by side is not just to look into the "kitchen" of the artist so much as it is a way of becoming an eye witness to a brilliant artistic game. The two basic themes of the Leiden etchings dating from 1620 to the early 1630s were self-portraits and depictions of the poor. Rembrandt created an enormous number of his own portraits. There were a total of around 80 of them, of which a third were etchings. The self-portraits served the young artist both as a means of mastering the art of conveying human emotions and as an advertisement - publication of the etchings was a means of gaining renown on the artistic market of Holland which was experiencing a period of buoyant growth and prosperity at the beginning of the 17th century. By 1633 Rembrandt was already an independent artist working on commissions from the Hague court and having several pupils. At this time he moved to Amsterdam, where he spent the rest of his life. In his etchings of the 1630s, we see new themes such as portraits made to order and nudes. The self-portraits also changed in a striking manner. Instead of small etchings which were the size of a postage stamp and were studies of human emotions, we now find depictions which were of a far more official nature. In these portraits we see a tale of the changed social status of the artist. The viewer faces not some angry young man with profuse and unruly hair, but a wealthy professional, an artist of the capital who knows his own worth. It is especially worthy mentioning his costume, which received minimal attention in the early self-portraits. Rembrandt depicts himself wearing not the fashionable dress of 1630s Amsterdam but a 16th century costume, "citing," as it were, the portraits of his idols, the great artists of the North, Luca of Leiden and Albrecht Duhrer, whose engravings he collected at Amsterdam auctions. Using the language of art, he thus boldly put himself among the ranks of his great predecessors, intentionally changing his signature beginning in 1632, from the initials "RHL," standing for Rembrandt Harmszoon van Leiden to "Rembrandt." The sense of the change was easily "read" by his contemporaries: it was a reference to the great names - Leonardo, Raphael and Titian, who had no need to be named in full. The years 1653 - 1655 can with full justification be called the years of Rembrandt's high achievement as an engraver. His main theme in these years was the history of Christ's life on Earth. In the three last years of his career as an engraver, Rembrandt made his own version of the Bible, virtually a "Gospel According to Rembrandt," in which he stood on equal footing with his great predecessors and competitors, the masters of the engraver's art like Albrecht Duhrer, Luca of Leiden and Jacques Callot. The culmination of this grand equivalent in etchings of the Holy Scripture was an etching in dry point technique, Christ Before the People (Ecce homo), which is displayed in the exhibition in two states. The exhibition of the Rovinsky collection is a rare opportunity to see nearly all of Rembrandt's legacy of etchings. In terms of selection of the etchings and their states, this collection is one of the most complete in the world. It includes 968 etchings by Rembrandt and his school. This collection tells us a lot about the collector. Dmitry Aleksandrovich Rovinsky (1824 - 1895) was a lawyer and one of the chief participants in judicial reform in Russia. Overall his collection amounted to around 100,000 Russian and Western European engravings. D.A. Rovinsky founded the Russian discipline of art history starting with icon painting and engravings and ending in research work such as catalogues on the Russian folk prints and Rembrandt etchings. Rovinsky's "Atlas" was a strict classification in which undivided attention was devoted to determining the "state" of each etching. This was also a very personal view of the artist, to a significant degree colored by mythologems which were passed along to Russian art lovers by French creators of myths. Largely thanks to D.A. Rovinsky and to V.V. Stasov, who strongly influenced him, the "Russian Rembrandt" was considered by their contemporaries as a forerunner of the Itinerant movement (Peredvizhniki), an artist of social anger and protest. In accordance with Dmitry Rovinsky's testament, the "Rembrandt" part of his collection was given to the Imperial Hermitage in 1897. Within the framework of the Hermitage UNESCO Program, the Government of the Netherlands provided $75,000 in 1977 to fund a multifaceted project to study the Rovinsky collection. The Dutch side offered ateliers and made available extensive use of modern technologies. The investigation and conservation work on the etchings was done in the Rijksmuseum by specialists of the State Hermitage in cooperation with their Dutch colleagues. All the etchings were photographed in their original form, in the old passe-partouts, in order to record the historical condition of the collection. Moreover, a "mild X-ray" was performed, making it possible to reveal water marks on the paper which Rembrandt used. The curator of the exhibition is Roman Gennadievich Grigoriev, acting director of the Sector of Engravings of the State Hermitage's Department of Western European Art, doctor of art history. An illustrated exhibition catalogue has been prepared. R.G. Grigoriev is its author. ABN-AMRO is the General Sponsor of the exhibition. |
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