The Flight into Egypt: a Night Piece

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the light of Joseph's lantern, the Holy Family journeys through a nighttime landscape (Matthew 2:13-15). In the 1650s Rembrandt created a number of night pieces-dark prints that allowed him to explore the various ways in which single sources of light illuminate otherwise pitch-black scenes. In this earliest experiment in creating dark prints, Rembrandt left ink on the surface of the printing plate, as though he were painting the etched copper plate anew with each impression. As a result, he created impressions of the same print that are unique in their treatment of light and dark. Here, the Virgin atop the mule is bathed in shadow, yet she stands out against an inky black landscape; Joseph steps through a play of shadows created by the brilliance of the lantern, the windows of which are the only spot where Rembrandt allowed the original white of the paper to remain visible.

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