From 21 January to 22 April 2012 the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is exhibiting more than a hundred drawings by seventeenth-century Netherlandish artists from the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. They include exceptional sheets by Rembrandt as well as masterpieces by many of his predecessors and contemporaries. It will be the first time that most of the drawings return to the city — and in some cases to the very house — where they were made. 

Rembrandt

Some of the drawings in the exhibition have a special relationship to Rembrandt’s graphic oeuvre. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was an etcher as well as a painter and draughtsman. Remarkably few of his drawn preliminary studies have survived, but the Hamburger Kunsthalle has two of them: the preparatory drawings for the print of St Jerome Reading in a Landscape and Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Both prints are in the Rembrandt House Museum’s collection and they will be shown in the exhibition 

Drawing in Rembrandt’s Day

The exhibition is in two parts: sheets by Rembrandt and his school and a wide-ranging selection of drawings by artists from Rembrandt’s time. Landscapes, tree portraits, genre scenes, figure studies, portraits, marines and Amsterdam cityscapes will present visitors with a representative overview of seventeenth-century drawing in the Northern Netherlands. Perhaps the most striking aspects are the outstanding quality of the sheets and the huge diversity of subjects, drawing styles and techniques. 

Picture: Rembrandt, St Jerome Reading in a Landscape, c. 1649, pen and brush in brown ink with white corrections .