Special Display: Master Printmakers of Northern Europe: Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck

This room showcases printmaking in Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, featuring works by three of the foremost contributors to the medium: on the center wall, the Dutch artist Rembrandt; on the right-hand wall, the German artist Albrecht Dürer; and on the left-hand wall, the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck, who spent much of his career working in England. All three artists excelled in a range of media. You can see paintings by Rembrandt and Van Dyck in galleries on this floor. Prints could circulate more readily than paintings, and in doing so helped these artists market their distinctive styles to wider audiences. They were sought out by collectors from early on.

All of the prints displayed in this room are examples of the diversity of techniques and visual effects possible in intaglio printmaking, where lines are incised on a metal plate, usually of copper. In their careers Dürer and Rembrandt particularly pushed the boundaries of the medium, including experimenting with different inks and papers. For his engravings, Dürer cut lines into the printing plate using a tool called a burin. This laborious process removes the metal cleanly, resulting in crisp yet graceful lines. With his use of drypoint, Rembrandt instead drew with a needle into the surface of the copper plate, displacing metal into rough ridges along the edges of his lines. Such ridges, called burrs, hold ink much less uniformly, creating rich shadows through a network of velvety, blurred marks. In etching, lines only need to be drawn onto a waxy layer covering the plate’s surface, and then an acid solution does the rest of the work to incise it. Van Dyck’s etchings register the relative ease and fluidity of that technique.