Rembrandt Comes to America by Anke Van Wagenberg

I recently attended the opening of the exhibition Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the United Kingdom, where it will be on view through June 1, 2025.

A fellow Dutchman, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) is widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. Apart from his atmospheric paintings, he also produced more than 300 etchings. Ranging in scale and detail, these etchings exemplify Rembrandt’s mastery of print.

Rembrandt, known by his first name (like modern-day Madonna or Sting) was a master of innovation. As an artist, he constantly sought out new possibilities and new solutions for making art. This is evident not only from his paintings, but also from the more than three hundred etchings that he made in his career. Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum presents the full range of Rembrandt’s etching output, alongside prints by select forerunners and contemporaries. It also demonstrates Rembrandt’s centuries-long impact on the field of printmaking through a select group of etchings by later nineteenth and twentieth-century artists.

A Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, Rembrandt was one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Today he is widely regarded as one of the two most important printmakers in history, along with Albrecht Dürer. From his earliest etchings, Rembrandt created original compositions oriented towards the specific character of the medium. As a result, his prints range widely from large to small, and from summary sketches to laborious and elaborate works. He addressed an equally varied set of subjects, including Biblical stories, portraits, depictions of exaggerated or characteristic facial expressions called “tronies,” observations of everyday life, landscapes, nude model studies, and even sheets packed with small sketches.

Rembrandt’s printmaking style changed over his career, and he honed his style across a wide variety of subjects. Both his progress and the variety of his output will be traced in a number of thematic sections in this exhibition. These sections will cover everything from Rembrandt’s masterful skills as a visual narrator, his bold exploration of light and dark, and how he used self-portraits to fashion his own visual identity and explore the complexity of aging. The exhibition also includes select comparative works by Rembrandt’s forerunners and contemporaries, including his teacher Pieter Lastman and his pupils, Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, which will contextualize his work and shed light on his specific innovations, such as his repeated experiments with etching, tonal effects, and the dramatic portrayal of his subjects.

The exhibition is accompanied by a free educational brochure developed by the AFA with an introduction by Epco Runia, Head of Collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, and with me as editor. Following Birmingham, UK, the exhibition will be on view at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (October 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026) and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, OH (February 7 – May 17, 2026).

Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Rembrandt House Museum.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County.