Rembrandt's Religious Prints

by Charles M. Rosenberg

Overview

A stunning catalogue of the seventy religious prints from the 2017 exhibition, featuring detailed background information on each piece.

Rembrandt’s stunning religious prints stand as evidence of the Dutch master’s extraordinary skill as a technician and as a testament to his genius as a teller of tales. Here, several virtually unknown etchings, collected by the Feddersen family and now preserved for the ages at the University of Notre Dame, are made widely available in a lavishly illustrated volume. Building on the contributions of earlier Rembrandt scholars, noted art historian Charles M. Rosenberg illuminates each of the seventyreligious prints through detailed background information on the artist’s career as well as the historical, religious, and artistic impulses informing their creation. Readers will enjoy an impression of the earliest work, The Circumcision (1625-26); the famous Hundred Guilder Print; the enigmatic eighth state of Christ Presented to the People; one of a handful of examples of the very rare final posthumous state of The Three Crosses; and an impression and counterproof of The Triumph of Mordecai. From the joyous epiphany of the coming of the Messiah to the anguish of the betrayal of a father (Jacob) by his children, from choirs of angels waiting to receive the Virgin into heaven to the dog who defecates in the road by an ancient inn (The Good Samaritan), Rembrandt’s etchings offer a window into the nature of faith, aspiration, and human experience, ranging from the ecstatically divine to the worldly and mundane. Ultimately, these prints—modest, intimate, fragile objects—are great works of art which, like all masterpieces, reward us with fresh insights and discoveries at each new encounter.

“Despite many reliable catalogues of Rembrandt etchings, very few have focused on the religious content of these prints. The outstanding range of the Feddersen Collection offers an excellent occasion for closer examination of Rembrandt’s development—as a printmaker but also as a spiritual devout Christian, especially evident from his thoughtful return to the same subjects across his career. Charles Rosenberg and his team at the Snite Museum deserve our thanks for fresh analysis of Rembrandt’s religious prints, combined with the latest scholarship on the artist and his etchings output. Rembrandt scholars but also all lovers of the artist will want to consult this important catalogue.” —Larry Silver, author (with Shelley Perlove) of Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age

“Rembrandt’s etchings of religious themes capture the emotional heart of their subjects through a uniquely inventive approach to both technique and content. . . . The seventy prints gathered by Jack and Alfrieda Feddersen span the full range of Rembrandt’s production and offer an outstanding resource for appreciation and research. This catalogue tells the fascinating story of how the collection was formed and brings a fresh analysis to each print. Charles Rosenberg’s extensive catalogue entries will be useful reading for anyone interested in the history of European art and one of its most talented practitioners, Rembrandt van Rijn.” —Stephanie Dickey, Queen’s University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253025906
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	145 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles M. Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. He is editor of The Court Cities of Northern Italy.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

JACK AND ALFRIEDA FEDDERSEN: BUILDING A COLLECTION

Julia Quinn and Charles M. Rosenberg

In 1991, the University of Notre Dame's Snite Museum of Art received seventy remarkable Rembrandt etchings as a bequest from Jack and Alfrieda Feddersen, avid art collectors and longtime residents of Elkhart, Indiana. In the late 1960s, the Feddersens began to focus their attention exclusively on Rembrandt's etchings devoted to religious subjects, and over the course of sixteen years, they assembled an impressive group of biblical narrative prints. Surviving invoices, as well as interviews with family members, business associates, and the staff of the Snite Museum of Art, have shed light on the Feddersens' objectives and have addressed such questions as how they came to focus on Rembrandt's religious prints, in particular; what motivated them to donate these etchings to the Snite Museum; and how the works they owned fit into the overall tradition of connoisseurship and collecting with regard to Rembrandt's prints.

Prints, including woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, are portable, relatively inexpensive works of art, and they have been collected in quantity since at least the late fifteenth century. Initially produced as devotional objects, talismans, textual illustrations, workshop models, or practical sources of ornament, prints were collected for both religious and utilitarian purposes. In the course of the seventeenth century, these works of art began to be prized and collected not only as objects of devotion or important sources of information about the natural world, history, religion, politics, and art, but also as aesthetic objects in their own right.

In the seventeenth century, prints were stored in cabinets, mounted on walls like paintings, or, much more commonly, pasted down in albums. Typically, the contents of these albums were organized by subject or artist, a reflection of the utilitarian vision of the medium and a perception of these collections as educational resources. In the early seventeenth century, collectors strove to amass encyclopedic collections, motivated in part by the same intellectual principles that resulted in the formation of the universal, microcosmic collections of natural oddities and manmade artifacts known as cabinets of curiosities. Perhaps the most famous example of an encyclopedic print collection is the one that was assembled by Abbé Michel de Marolles (1600–81). Between 1644 and 1666, Marolles put together what must certainly have been the largest collection of prints: more than 123,400 impressions gathered together in 400 large volumes and 120 small ones. These volumes were organized according to more than seventy different subjects, topics that ranged from maps to clocks to gardening to dances to the lives of saints. About one-third of the volumes were dedicated to artists. Marolles also recorded the number of impressions he possessed by each artist. He owned 224 works by Rembrandt.

Rembrandt himself owned a significant collection of prints that were gathered in albums and stored in boxes and baskets. Although these certainly served as an important visual resource, it is also likely that he collected them for their intrinsic aesthetic and historical value. An inventory taken at the time of Rembrandt's bankruptcy in 16569 listed thirty-four albums containing graphic works by or after a wide variety of artists, including Lucas van Leyden, Titian, Raphael, Federico Barocci, Mantegna, Brueghel, Cranach, Antonio Tempesta, Maarten van Heemskerck, the Carracci, Hendrick Goltzius, Rubens, and others. Historians Roelof van Gelder and Jaap van der Veen estimated that on average, an album of prints held about 115 sheets. Based on this figure and the recording of loose prints and works included in albums of drawings, van Gelder and van der Veen estimated Rembrandt's collection at over 4,000 prints.

As art historian William Robinson noted, a new type of collector began to emerge by the middle of the seventeenth century, one who focused more on issues of process, invention, and quality, rather than on sheer numbers and breadth of coverage. Driven by a connoisseur's aesthetic, this kind of refined collector was interested in questions of inking, types of support, variations in states, and the clarity and integrity of individual impressions. Some collected the works of only a few artists, seeking to acquire complete sets of the highest-quality examples of all of their works. Artist biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719) acknowledged this passion for creating a comprehensive collection in his remarks about the popularity of Rembrandt's etchings during the late seventeenth century:

The rage for his works was then so great that anyone who did not own both the little Juno [B. 112] with and without her crown, or the little Joseph [B. 37] with and without the dark throne, and others besides, was not considered a true lover of art. Yes, everyone wanted The Woman by the Stove [B. 197], one of the least of his works, with and without the white bonnet, with and without the stove key even though, as if it were not important enough for him to be bothered with it, he allowed it to be sold through his son Titus.

According to Robinson, the Dutch art dealer Jan Pieterz Zomer (1641–1724) exemplified this shift in attitude toward print collecting as an end in itself. Zomer collected works by a variety of artists, but focused his efforts on Rembrandt, seeking to collect all of his prints in every state. After fifty years of collecting, he had acquired 428 prints by the artist. Even more significant, perhaps, was the fact that "Zomer's values were those of the print connoisseur. It was the beauty of the work of art that motivated him, not a thirst for universal knowledge."

Rembrandt has always been admired for his inventiveness and skill as a printmaker, and his works were widely prized and passionately collected even during his own lifetime. In 1660, Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio Ruffo commissioned the Italian artist Guercino to paint a companion piece for Rembrandt's portrait of Alexander the Great. In his correspondence with Ruffo, Guercino expressed his admiration for Rembrandt based on his acquaintance with the Dutch artist's prints: "As for the particulars of the half-length figure by Rembrandt which is in the possession of your Excellency, it cannot be other than perfection, because I have seen a number of his printed works which have appeared in these parts; they are very beautiful, engraved in good taste and in a good manner ... I frankly consider him to be a great virtuoso."

Filippo Baldinucci (1625–97), a Florentine ducal bureaucrat, amateur artist, and author who wrote a history of etching and engraving that included a biography of Rembrandt, was very critical of the artist as a painter, but he begrudgingly expressed his respect for him as a printmaker:

The way in which this artist truly distinguished himself was in a certain most bizarre manner which he invented for etching on copper plates. This manner too was entirely his own, neither used again by others nor seen again: with certain scratches of varying strength and irregular and isolated strokes, a deep chiaroscuro of great strength nevertheless springing forth out of the whole. And it must be conceded that in this particular branch of engraving [drypoint] Rembrandt was much more highly esteemed by the professors of art than in his painting. Houbraken's 1718 biography of Rembrandt also remarked upon the artist's unique methods:

He [Rembrandt] has produced many witty Histories, Figures, little Portraits and numerous male and female heads with his needle, many of which are etched on copper, which have been circulated thanks to the press and to the delight of lovers of art.

He had his own particular manner of preparing and handling his etched plates, something he never shared with his pupils. It is not possible to know how it was done, and thus the invention has gone to the grave with its inventor.

Rembrandt's etchings were as popular in England as on the continent. Charles Rogers (1711–84), a self-educated customhouse official whose prodigious collection of prints included works by Rembrandt, published a volume dedicated to the history of the art of drawing in which he included a biography of the artist. His fulsome praise of Rembrandt and his etchings indicates the esteem in which the printmaker was held in England during the Georgian period.

He [Rembrandt] expressed his inimitable Coloring even in his Prints. In general painters etch only their historical compositions; but very few, except Van Dyk [sic] and Rembrandt, have attempted Portraits. Rembrandt etched them with the same judgment that he painted them; every Line is spirited, and represents the touch of his pencil; nothing can exceed the effects of his Chiaro-scuro: a light and free Point went over his outlines and his hatchings, but with a Taste and Air of Facility which make us think that he did this work very quick, and without much trouble. Others have arranged their strokes, and cut their copper with greater labor; but he alone has dispensed with such fatigue, and has had the art of expressing Flesh, and producing Tints with a dry Point: the Effect of a beautiful tout-ensemble was his end, and he has attained it.

... The Prints of no Master have been more eagerly desired, or purchased at greater prices, than those of Rembrandt. The Freedom of his Etching, the Force of his light and shadow, and the perfect Nature expressed in his Portraits, have charms for the Artist, the Connoisseur, and the Gentleman. Zealous Collectors are not satisfied with having the best of his works, but are uneasy 'till they become possessed of Impressions from all his plates.

John Barnard (1709–84) was another of the great eighteenth-century English print collectors with a passion for Rembrandt. Barnard, the independently wealthy son of a British financier, was described by Dutch scholar and collector Frits Lugt as one of the best judges of art of his epoch. In his magisterial work on collectors' marks, Lugt said that among all of the English marks, Barnard's was the most revered. "The sheets from his [Barnard's] collection are always the choicest, both in terms of quality and condition. ... The perfect taste of this collector was almost never at fault, and consequently his initials ... on a sheet ensures that ... a better impression [of a print] is virtually not to be found." According to the 1798 catalog of the posthumous sale of Barnard's print collection, the foundation of his collection of Rembrandt etchings came from the holdings of Willem Six, a nephew of Jan Six, one of Rembrandt's most important patrons. The catalog lists 425 individual sheets by Rembrandt, including an impression of the very rare fifth state of The Three Crosses (Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves [B. 78, cat. no. 54]). This impression may have been purchased by Thomas Major (1714/20–99), an English engraver known primarily for his landscapes and views of ancient ruins. His collection of prints and drawings, including twenty-eight etchings by Rembrandt, was sold in London in January 1801. It is quite likely that The Three Crosses was purchased at this sale by George Hibbert (1757–1837). Hibbert, an extremely wealthy merchant and member of Parliament who made his money in shipping, particularly to and from the West Indies, was also an inveterate bibliophile and collector of prints. In April and May 1809, his collection of almost 10,000 prints was sold at auction in London by a Mr. T. Philipe. Hibbert's largest holdings were of original etchings by Rembrandt and prints after Rubens. The former were sold in 306 lots of one or more impressions, and the latter in 388 lots. The impression of the fifth state of The Three Crosses was sold on the thirteenth day of the sale, and it is this impression that Jack Feddersen ultimately purchased from Harrods in London almost 170 years later. It was an acquisition that linked four discerning collectors over the centuries.

In assembling their collection during the latter part of the twentieth century, the Feddersens faced a daunting task. High-quality Rembrandt prints not only were in great demand and consequently quite expensive, but also were quite rare. Many of the best impressions were already in museums or private collections that had been assembled long ago. As a result, the easiest and most affordable way to begin a Rembrandt collection would have been to purchase posthumous impressions of lesser quality, examples of which were and are still readily available. A few years ago, David Tunick, president of David Tunick Inc., a gallery specializing in old master prints from which the Feddersens purchased nine Rembrandt prints, stated that "90% of what is on the market is junk." He said that although poor-quality impressions were still procurable, it was quite difficult to build a collection of medium to high quality during the period in which the Feddersens collected. Yet, despite these challenges, Jack and Alfrieda Feddersen were able to build an outstanding collection in less than two decades. Each print under consideration for possible purchase was inspected by Jack Feddersen and was subject to return if it did not meet his standards.

Surviving invoices for all but three of the prints — Flight into Egypt: Small Plate (B. 52, cat. no. 27), Flight into Egypt: Crossing a Brook (B. 55, cat. no. 30), and Christ Returning from the Temple with His Parents (B. 60, cat. no. 40) — have made it possible to construct a chronology of the collection's creation and growth for the first time. Correspondence between Jack Feddersen and various art dealers still exists, and interviews with Stephen Spiro, the former John D. Reilly Curator of Western Arts at the Snite Museum; Dean Porter, director emeritus of the museum; David Tunick; and John and Ann Feddersen, two of the donors' children, have also provided valuable insights into the way in which the Feddersens acquired and shaped their collection.

Although Jack and Alfrieda Feddersen lived in Elkhart, Indiana, neither was originally from the area. Alfrieda was born in Springfield, Illinois. Jack Feddersen was born in Clinton, Iowa, and attended Wartburg College for two years before transferring to the University of Illinois. After earning his bachelor's, Jack went on to get a master of business administration degree from New York University, where he wrote a thesis on band instruments. He sent his research to the Selmer Company, a manufacturer of musical instruments based in Elkhart, and in 1940, he was hired as the company's advertising director. In 1945, Jack was elected executive vice president of the company, and in 1960, the same year in which he married Alfrieda, he became president. Alfrieda became active in the Elkhart Symphony Club and Elkhart Concert Club, while Jack continued to play a leadership role at the Selmer Company until he retired in 1974. The Feddersens purchased nearly all of their Rembrandt prints after his retirement. Jack Feddersen passed away in 1990, and Alfrieda died in 1995.

Although the Feddersens were always interested in art, they did not have any specific goals in mind when they began to collect. Jack Feddersen, a self-taught artist, developed a particular interest in drawing and printmaking. At first, he gravitated toward modern prints and drawings, purchasing works by Miró, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as images by artists from the Elkhart area. In general, he tended to favor black-and-white prints over colored ones. Then, looking to expand the scope of their print collection, the Feddersens purchased their first three Rembrandt prints — Christ and the Woman of Samaria among Ruins (B. 71, cat. no. 44), Faust (B. 270),34 and Stoning of St. Stephen (B. 97, cat. no. 67) — on November 15, 1966, from the New York art gallery Associated American Artists. They were immediately attracted to the artist's unique, innovative style, and over time, this attraction became a passion. "I think that was really the start of his etching collection," said their son John Feddersen. "Before, [Jack's] collection hadn't had much direction. Once he got going on the Rembrandts, he wanted to know everything about them."

Soon after these initial purchases, the Feddersens chose to focus exclusively on Rembrandt prints inspired by biblical subjects. Their decision to concentrate on collecting the works of a single artist and theme was not unusual. According to David Tunick, identifying a specific area of interest has been a common practice among modern collectors of Rembrandt prints. It brings a particular focus to a collection and, given the scarcity of available fine impressions and the range of different images and prints Rembrandt created, it provides the collector with a more attainable goal. The Feddersens decided that Jack would be in charge of researching and purchasing the prints, while Alfrieda would organize receipts, invoices, and correspondence. Over time, John Feddersen recalled, his father acquired and read over one hundred books on Rembrandt, etching, printmaking, and the art of the print, in order to educate himself as a buyer. "He had an idea of what he wanted. With the Rembrandt etchings, there are a lot of problems of making sure the advertised etching is what they say it is." As for subject matter, the Feddersens decided that the biblical narratives were the best examples of Rembrandt's ambitious and expressive style. In addition, religious subjects were especially appealing because Alfrieda Feddersen was a very devout Episcopalian. After the family purchased a print, Alfrieda would locate the corresponding Bible verse and keep a copy in her files.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2017 Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame.
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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
Jack and Alfrieda Feddersen: Building a Collection
Rembrandt's Religious Prints
Chronology of Rembrandt's Life
Abbreviations
Catalog
Appendix: Additional Rembrandt Prints in the Snite Museum of Art
Glossary of Print Terms
Bibliography