item details
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, and it also explains why, 200-300 years later, they were affordable to collectors such as Bishop Ditlev Monrad and Wellington collector and philanthropist Sir John Ilott, as here.
Our print dates from Rembrandt's later career - in the mid-1650s he was almost obsessed with the theme - producing three paintings, a drawing and this etching. He had already addressed it over 20 years previously in the etching Christ and the Woman of Samaria among Ruins (1634) which is also in Te Papa's collection (1965-0012-27). The 'arched print' depicts the Gospel text (John 4.4-42), when Jesus converts a Gentile, the Samarian woman and, at a deeper level, movingly addresses the reconciliation of the Christian faith with a receptive stranger. Christ is celebrated as the 'fountain of water springing up into eternal life', while the Samarians were an ethnic group reviled by the Jews for their heterodox Temple cult in which they worshipped idols alongside the Lord. Hence the woman's initial disbelief when she asks Jesus 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me a woman of Samaria?'
For this etching Rembrandt may have been inspired by a 16th-century Italian painting of the same subject in his own collection. This is indicated by the structures in the background, chiefly the circular temple. What is new is Christ's humble pose as he asks the woman of Samaria for water. That she has not yet recognised him as the Messiah is suggested by the dark veil of shadow covering her face.
This is a posthumous fourth state of the etching, with two lines added above the pupil of Christ's left eye, the nose redrawn in one line and connected to his left eyebrow, the mouth strengthened, with the second signature and date on Christ's robe burnished away, before extensive reworking, restoring the shadow on the wall above the well. It dates from some point in the 18th century, but predates the period (1797-c. 1809) when the plate belonged to Henri Louis Basan, whose Parisian workshop issued the fifth and final state of the etching.
References: New Hollstein Dutch 302, 4th of 5 states; Hollstein Dutch 70, undescribed state.
See:
Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt's Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (Pennsylvania, 2010), pp. 42-43.
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2017