Christ at Emmaus: the larger plate.

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, three centuries later, they were affordable for Wellington collector and philanthropist Sir John Ilott, who presented 37 Rembrandt prints to the National Art Gallery between 1952 and 1969.

 

This print is always subtitled 'the larger plate' to distinguish it from 'the smaller plate' of 20 years earlier (1634) which depicts a near identical theme. An impression of this print is also in Te Papa's collection and was presented by Ilott (1952-0003-51). Here, in his later career, Rembrandt has used the whiteness of his paper in radical ways, content to suggest form with a simple line or two and let the blank paper do the rest. The sketchiness of Christ's face is meant to suggest divine revelation. After he rose from the dead, Christ appeared alongside two disciples who were heading to Emmaus. They didn't recognise him but invited him to supper at an inn. When he broke the bread - in the fashion of the Last Supper - recognition dawned on the disciples (Luke 24.30-32).  In that instant Christ supposedly vanished, which in Rembrandt's conception has already begun. He is still there, but only for a moment longer.

 

Most representations show the moment of breaking the bread and not, as here, the moment after. The pose of Christ and the canopy at the top were borrowed from a print after Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, which Rembrandt copied in several drawings. The frontal presentation of the scene also recalls Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of the theme.

 

This is an 18th century impression from the fourth state of the etching plate, distinguished by the addition by its publisher of two dots in the upper left corner and also the use of a mezzotint rocker (e.g. on the right-hand side of the table directly below the tablecloth, and around the legs of the man standing to the left.) However, it pre-dates the fifth and final state, when the plate was in the Parisian workshop of Henri Louis Basan, where it was reworked at some point between 1797 and c. 1809.

 

References:

New Hollstein Dutch 283, 4th of 5 states; Hollstein Dutch 87, 3rd of 3 states

 

See:

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/RembrandtPassionHandlist.pdf

 

Minneapolis Institute of Art, https://collections.artsmia.org/art/55750/christ-at-emmaus-the-larger-plate-rembrandt-harmensz-van-rijn

 

Dr Mark Stocker     Curator, Historical International Art         July 2017