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Overview
During his lifetime, Rembrandt's extraordinary skills as a printmaker were the main source of his international fame. Unlike his oil paintings, prints travelled light and were relatively cheap. For this reason, they soon became very popular with collectors not only within, but also beyond the borders of the Netherlands. It also explains why, three centuries later, he was affordable to Wellington collector and philanthropist Sir John Ilott, who presented 37 Rembrandt prints to the National Art Gallery.
In this small etching, dating from the height of Rembrandt's fashionability and fame, he depicts a heavenly vision of the Madonna and Child. He may have drawn inspiration for the print from several sources, including Albrecht Dürer's Madonna and Child on the Crescent Moon from the title page of his famous Life of the Virgin series, a small print of the same subject by Jan van de Velde after a design by Willem Buytewech, and Federico Barocci's Madonna and Child.
It would be fair to call the Rembrandt a free copy after Barocci. The two are nearly the same size, and Rembrandt's seated Virgin Mary is almost an exact repetition of them Italian master's equivalent (albeit in reverse). It is striking that Rembrandt faithfully adopted the uncommon motif of the Virgin Mary's folded hands. He also appears to have followed Barocci in the distribution of light and dark, and in the etching technique with simple cross-hatching in the shaded areas. Nevertheless, the two prints are very different in tone: Barocci's Madonna is a young, sweetly smiling girl with an idealised, symmetrical doll's face. The Christ Child is a burly infant that gazes directly at the viewer and makes a gesture of blessing. In contrast, Rembrandt's Virgin seems scarcely aware of the child's presence. She stares past the viewer into the distance. His Christ is also less robust, a sickly baby that turns away from the viewer, wholly unconscious of his divinity. When set beside Barocci's sprightly Counter Reformation icon, Rembrandt's Madonna seems laden with unfathomable emotional ambiguity. It is safe to assume that Rembrandt owned an impression of Barocci's etching, as his 1656 inventory lists a book 'with copper prints by Vanni and others including Barocci'.
Anna Rigg, Summer Research Scholar at Te Papa, writing in her blog 'Taking the Rembrandts for a walk', noted details in his prints that might escape many people at first glance, like the little upside-down face on the Virgin Mary's knee, 'a surrealistic trace' of an earlier composition on the etching plate. She adds: 'It seems odd at first that in The Virgin and Child in the clouds, Rembrandt didn't bother to burnish out his abandoned sketch before etching over it with the new image; instead, he left the little face for all to see, a discordant note in a devotional image'. But looking more closely at Rembrandt's wider oeuvre, she states: 'the undisguised presence of... mystery faces begins to look less like an anomaly and much more like a deliberate decision. Clearly Rembrandt saw that print collectors hungered not only for rare and beautiful images, but also for a sense of insight into the inner workings of genius. He capitalised on this hunger by leaving occasional visible traces of his own artistic methods, granting buyers the behind-the-scenes glimpses they desired.'
Te Papa's impression is from the first of two states, the second of which was posthumous.
References: New Hollstein Dutch 188, 1st of 2 states; Hollstein Dutch 61, only state.
See:
Christopher-Clark Fine Art, http://clarkfineart.com/artists/old-masters/rembrandt-van-rijn/virgin-and-child-in-the-clouds/
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2017