Rembrandt’s journey: painter • draftsman • etcher

Exhibition: 14 February - 9 May 2004

Curators

Rembrandt’s journey: painter • draftsman • etcher is curated in Boston by Clifford S. Ackley, chair of the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs (Ruth and Carl Shapiro Curator of Prints and Drawings); in Chicago by Suzanne McCullagh, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator of Earlier Prints and Drawings, Department of Prints and Drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago.

From the museum website

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) is one of the most creative and celebrated artists in history. With more than 200 works from all periods of his long career — approximately 20 paintings, 30 drawings, and 150 prints drawn from major collections here and abroad — this is the first American exhibition to explore Rembrandt’s astonishing range and variety of activity as a brilliant etcher seen in the context of his paintings and drawings. Rembrandt’s Journey highlights the parallel relationships among the master’s paintings, drawings, and prints — closely examining imagery, narrative content, and the marks of the artist’s hand, as well as his approach to religious illustration in all of the media he mastered and reinvented. A closer study of the expressions, gestures, and body language of his figures will provide deeper insight into the inventive, subtle, and complex way he interpreted Biblical texts and imaginatively projected himself into them. The exhibition will focus on several of the subjects to which Rembrandt returned—portraits and self-portraits, everyday life, landscape, the nude—at various stages of his career.

Rembrandt’s journey: painter • draftsman • etcher is co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Catalogue

Clifford S. Ackley, Rembrandt’s journey: painter, draftsman, etcher, in collaboration with Ronni Baer, Thomas E. Rassieur, and William W. Robinson, Boston (Museum of Fine Arts) and Chicago (Art Institute) 2003.