Live Auction 20450Old Master and British Works on Paper: Drawings, Watercolours and Prints 1500-1900
REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN (1606-1669)
Lot 210 PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE ENGLISH COLLECTION

REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN (1606-1669)

Christ seated disputing with the Doctors

Closed5 July 2022

Price Realised

GBP 5,670

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REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN (1606-1669)
Christ seated disputing with the Doctors
etching, 1654, on laid paper, without watermark, a very good impression of the only state, with narrow margins, a couple of printer's creases, otherwise in good condition
Plate 94 x 144 mm.
Sheet 98 x 147 mm.

Ducs d'Arenberg, Brussels and Nordkirchen, Westphalia (Lugt 567); their sale, Christie's, London, 14 July 1902 (and following days), lot 393 (with another; £ 3-5; to Maggs).

Specialist note

Rembrandt depicted this subject on three different occasions and in the present example altered the traditional compositional structure, as regularly seen in Renaissance representations of the event, with Christ placed on a raised platform instructing the elders, as a manifestation of the New Law overcoming the Old. Rembrandt's decision to move away from this iconography may have been influenced by Calvin's understanding of the Gospel of Luke, emphazing the elders' acknowledgement of the child's divinity and their invitation to sit among them. For the reformer, the miracle related to the fact that the doctors treated Jesus as an equal. This sense of equality and Christ's divine humility is reflected by Rembrandt's compositional choice.
(See M. Rosenberg, Rembrandt's Religious Prints, Bloomington, 2017, n. 39, p. 226-228.)