Museum press release
This summer exhibition presents the work of Rembrandt, the printmaker. The exhibition comes from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford which has an almost complete collection of Rembrandt print. Rembrandt was one of the masters of printmaking and a major innovator of the art. For him, unlike his contemporaries, printmaking was not a technique echoing painting but an independent art form. He fundamentally altered the composition of his prints as he worked on them, adding to and changing their form. Prints taken from the same plate at different stages of the creative process provide a unique opportunity to follow the artist’s thought process. The finest example of this is the self-portrait print, of which five different stages are on view at Retretti.
The 65 prints on exhibition span the artist´s career and versatile subject content, showing the various phases of development of his production. Rather than giving an overview of Rembrandt’s print production the exhibition concentrates on a number of themes: portraits, landscapes and religious compositions. On show also are a number of individual works with other subjects. The exhibition has been compiled and curated by the director of the Ashmolean Museum’s print department, Christian Rümelin.