Elsje Christiaens Hanging on a Gibbet

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Elsje Christiaens, an 18-year old woman from Jutland was executed in May 1, 1664, just two weeks after her arrival in Amsterdam in April of that year. In a violent argument over unpaide rent, Elsje hit her landlady over the head with an ax and knocked her down the cellar stairs. She was exposed to viewers on the gibbet in the gallows field outside of Amsterdam along with the ax, the instrument of her crime. With intense scrutiny, Rembrandt drew her lifeless body in quick angular lines. Remarkably, the Met possesses the two known drawings by Rembrandt of this event.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art