Touching storyteller, courageous innovator and creator of a profound body of work: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was a gifted artist whose work has fascinated and inspired for over four hundred years. His prints were in great demand during his lifetime. He worked intensively with the new medium of etching, bringing everyday and dramatic stories, portraits and landscapes to paper with vivid strokes. Thousands of lines create narrative moods or reveal the finest nuances of human expression. Rembrandt exploited the technical possibilities of etching to the full in his exciting interplay of light and dark. By carefully placing light sources, he created fascinating contrasts to emphasize the central elements of a scene.
His prints are dynamic and sensitive, and his motifs are true to life. Rembrandt created a dense but not opaque network of lines, with dense hatching running both crosswise and parallel. This creates effects of light that are almost mystical. Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro is considered to be the essence of his work. His own biography was also eventful, characterized by extreme highs and lows. Success and prosperity were followed by economic decline. At an early age, he had to mourn the loss of three of his children and his wife Saskia. The great artist’s life came to a bitter end and Rembrandt was buried anonymously. However, his ambitious work had brought about a change in the general taste of art: instead of idealized depictions, the focus was now on the unadorned, real image of man.
Rembrandt was never in Germany. But the artist and the Kunsthaus Stade are contemporaries: when Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in 1669, the former merchant’s house was two years old – built after a devastating fire in 1659 destroyed two-thirds of the town. The then Swedish Stade was rebuilt on the old layout and the old city centre is still dominated by buildings from this period. The exhibition floors are therefore not only the setting for Rembrandt’s prints, but the house and its surroundings provide a particularly appropriate backdrop for his works.
Exhibition catalogue
A unique collection of Rembrandt prints lay dormant in a safe in the Netherlands for more than a hundred years. Begun by her grandfather, the collection has been expertly expanded by Charlotte Meyer and is now being presented to the public for the first time in Stade. Works from all of Rembrandt’s creative periods are juxtaposed with works by his contemporaries and students, for whom he was both an authority and a source of inspiration. The exhibition is accompanied by a magazine with numerous illustrations and texts by Ghizlaine Jahidi, Charlotte Meyer and Regina Wetjen.