Hundred Guilder Print

[12] Wieseman describes the etching as a "technical tour de force, incorporating an enormous diversity of printmaking styles and techniques": the group of figures at the left side of the print, for example, is deftly indicated with a minimum of lightly bitten lines; in contrast, the evocative richness of the blacks and the depth of tone in the right half of the print represents Rembrandt's experimental competition with the newly discovered mezzotint technique.

A camel entering the gate at the extreme right of the print parallel to the young man seems to link him directly to verse 24.

Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder print, as it has become known, has been famous since his own day for the extraordinarily high price it fetched.

[16] In this print, Rembrandt combines life study, close reading of gospel passages, and his mastery of the medium.

Various preparatory studies indicate how carefully Rembrandt worked out individual figures and how he finalized the entire composition by the time it was first printed.

Wieseman describes the etching as a technical tour de force, incorporating an enormous diversity of styles and techniques used in printmaking.

The group of figures at the left side of the print for example, is deftly indicated with a minimum of lightly bitten lines; in contrast, the evocative richness of the blacks and the depth of tone in the right half of the print represents Rembrandt's experimental competition with the newly discovered mezzotint technique[17] In the decade following 1642, Rembrandt’s production changed in several ways.

At the same time, he embarked on a number of extremely ambitious etchings, such as the portrait (1647) of his friend Jan Six and especially the Hundred Guilder print.

[citation needed] During the early 1650s, Jan Steen (1626–1679) appropriated aspects of Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder print, creating one of the earliest visual responses to this masterwork.

Steen transformed somber and ill figures from the Hundred Guilder print into raucously playful, joking, or drunk participants in the farce of a marriage ritual.

In transforming the serious biblical subject into a comic village wedding, Steen departed from the general reverential regard for the print and demonstrated his respectful rivalry with Rembrandt.

[citation needed] Around 1775, Captain William Baillie printed a 100 impression edition of an extensively re-worked, by his own hand, version of Rembrandt's original copper plate.

More typically, however, he reproduced the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters in his own or aristocratic collections, specialising in Rembrandt van Rijn.

[citation needed] He acquired the plate, already worn down by repeated printings, from the painter and engraver John Greenwood.

[21] Rembrandt was fascinated with subjects from the Old and New Testaments and, as in Abraham and Isaac, he enjoyed revealing realistic human emotion and narrative detail inspired by these stories which lead to the origin of the Hundred Guilder Print.

The Three Trees in which he evoked the typically blustery and rainy Dutch weather, is the most intensely dramatic of these works.

Rembrandt often dramatically reworked his late prints, creating almost entirely new visions of a subject with each state.