Rembrandt as a Painter: New Technical Research

PREFACE​

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In 2021–22, the Städel Museum and the National Gallery of Canada presented an exhibition on Rembrandt's rise to fame in Amsterdam, entitled Rembrandt in Amsterdam. Creativity and Competition. In January 2022, the Städel hosted an international online symposium, "New Technical Research on Rembrandt: Paintings, Drawings, Prints", presenting recent technical research conducted at museums in Europe, the US and Canada. The conference brought together perspectives from the disciplines of art history and conservation science and explored how current technologies and methods can shed new light on Rembrandt's techniques and studio practice while pointing the way to future research. Recordings can still be found on the Städel YouTube channel.​​

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This special issue of ArtMatters presents papers developed from the symposium, with a focus on Rembrandt as a painter. Essays reflect recent collaborations among art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists at eight different museums on two continents. Each research group focused on works in its own collection. One essay documents an on-going collaboration among three institutions in three countries (the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Canada); this international project presents a model of how current research can be advanced by sharing information (including high-resolution digital images) online. Two essays present investigations undertaken at the Städel. Examinations of twenty-seven Rembrandt paintings at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, beginning in 2011 are synthesized here for the first time. The remaining chapters present case studies of three paintings at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, and of individual works at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Each report presents new data and offers insights into Rembrandt's complex practice as both artist and teacher.

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At the Städel Museum, new technical research on Rembrandt was made possible by the acquisition of a Bruker M6 JETSTREAM micro-XRF scanner. The examinations took place in the context of a collaborative project between the Städel Museum, the Städel Cooperation Professorship at the Art Historical Institute of Goethe University, the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and the Department of Material Analysis of the Technical University Darmstadt, funded by the Dr. Rolf M. Schwiete Foundation. Stephan Knobloch, Head of Art Technology and Conservation – Paintings and Modern Sculpture, and the team of technicians and exhibition management greatly supported the technical investigations. At the Department of German, Dutch and Flemish Paintings before 1800 thanks go to Samuel Fickinger, Leslie P. Zimmermann and Fabian Ohlenschläger who helped with the organization of the symposium and the editorial work on this volume. Last, but not least, the Städel Museum is grateful to Sigrid Krämer for her generous financial support of this publication.

 

The guest editors extend warm thanks to our anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments, to Erma Hermens, Petria Noble, Moorea Hall-Aquitania and Paul van Laar at ArtMatters for their generous guidance and support, to Joshua Waterman for his elegant translations of the German essays, and above all to our authors for sharing the results of their exciting research.

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Stephanie S. Dickey, Mareike Gerken, Jochen Sander and Friederike Schütt

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