Rembrandt At 400: Master Prints From The National Gallery Of Scotland
Until August 27; National Gallery of Scotland

With four weeks to go, you could be forgiven for not knowing about Rembrandt’s 400th birthday on 15 July. While Amsterdam offers a carnival of Rembrandt-related delights (who could resist Rembrandt The Musical, or that ambiguous activity tantalisingly entitled “Good-Looking Boys In The 17th Century”), here there’s been much less fuss.

The opening weeks of the Hunterian’s show of Rembrandt prints, which continues until 15 July, were lost in the noise of Glasgow International. In Edinburgh, the National Gallery’s own small exhibition of its own prints is easy to miss, tucked in behind a maze of late Victorian Scottish art. Nevertheless, between them, the two shows offer 50 first class etchings by the master of the Dutch Golden Age.

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born in Leiden on 15 July, 1606. The son of a miller, his talent was spotted early, and by his mid-twenties he had achieved success in Amsterdam. His unique style of painting, though deeply embedded in the Northern European tradition, was head and shoulders above anything that had gone before.

Rembrandt had everything: rich colouring and painterly surfaces, whether detailing individual wrinkles or splashing on the roughest of brushstrokes. Every figure had an easy, fluent movement, but most importantly of all, his characters were utterly human. Much more than actors on a theatrical stage, his subjects had thoughts, feelings and a life-time of experience written on their faces.

Dutch 17th century painters catered for a new market: protestant middle-class burghers who’d made it to the rank of gentleman, and the civic organisations to which they belonged. These were a far cry from the royal courts and powerful cathedrals of southern Europe, or even of neighbouring Flanders, where Rubens made his fortune painting grand, extravagant dramas.

This was a time and a place which was ready for Rembrandt. His holy family was a real family, with the stresses of parenthood plain in Mary and Joseph’s faces, and the young Christ a real child and not some glowing putto. His female nudes were real women with garter marks pinching their legs, and cellulite and sagging flesh galore. The poor and sick in his biblical scenes weren’t sentimental ciphers, but genuine cripples and beggars from the streets of Amsterdam.

It wasn’t just the paintings that brought Rembrandt to fame. He was as celebrated for his etchings, if not more so. Prints, by their nature, travel farther and wider than expensive paintings, and even in his own lifetime, Rembrandt’s etchings were extremely collectable. Until then, artists (like Rubens) tended to use print-making merely to produce commercial copies of their paintings. Rembrandt made it into a whole new art form.

Artists of his time were encouraged to make prints with precise, regular lines, carefully premeditated and highly structured. Rembrandt came along and started sketching directly on the plate, using his needle like a brush to create fluid, painterly works. He is the undisputed master of drypoint, using its intense and velvety line to create prints of astounding visual richness.

The richest of all is known as the Hundred Guilder Print, possibly because of the high value placed on it during Rembrandt’s lifetime. The artist spent years working and reworking this print, combining numerous techniques with total mastery. The crowded scene, centred around a radiant Christ, ranges from passages so breathtakingly soft that they approximate watercolour, to sections of hard-edged, linear drawing.

The dynamic mass of people, playing out events from St Matthew’s Gospel, is made up of dozens of individual character studies, each worth a print in its own right. Out of less than 300 known etchings by the artist, around 50 are of beggars and vagrants, like those in the Hundred Guilder Print, drawn from life. In Rembrandt’s bible, you smell the sweat, and hear the bickering locals. You believe you are witnessing something fresh, and absolutely real.

Nothing is too sacred for a drop of realism from Rembrandt. In his biblical parable of charity, The Good Samaritan, he doesn’t just add the incidental figure of woman at a well, but he finishes off the foreground with a defecating dog.

When Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, in traditional prints, she is modestly arranged and he is nobly upright. In Rembrandt’s version, the desperate housewife is twisted in her eagerness, legs splayed and everything on show; so much so that a later collector of this print had some drapery added for modesty’s sake.

Rembrandt was criticised by classicists for not portraying the most beautiful of the beautiful in everything he did, and he left a talent spotter stunned when at the age of 23 he showed no inclination to travel to Italy to see the work of Michelangelo and Raphael. Though he learned much from Renaissance prints, Rembrandt’s real debt was to artists such as Dürer, who drew things exactly as he saw them, and to Caravaggio, who was famously criticised for using “a dirty strumpet” to pose as the Virgin Mary.

Following in this tradition of drawing from real life, Rembrandt understood that even the greatest events of history would have been surrounded by a confusion of characters, all distracted by their own personal concerns. His largest print, The Three Crosses, began life as a chaotic crowd scene almost swamping the crucified figures in the background.

But that turned out to be too much even for Rembrandt, and in the most dramatic reworking in the history of printmaking, he practically obliterated the crowd. With intense hatching, Rembrandt shrouded almost everything in darkness, apart from the now isolated figure of the dying Christ.

In 1661, eight years before his death, Rembrandt inexplicably stopped etching. His extravagant lifestyle had led to bankruptcy, and nearly 30 years after the premature death of his first wife, his second love was to die of the plague, followed by his son, Titus. When he went to a rented grave in 1669, Rembrandt left behind a body of prints which has never been surpassed. We’re privileged, as a nation, to own 32 of them.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 18.06.06