Study Sheet with Three Women and a Boy

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rembrandt often picked up pen and paper to capture a briefly glimpsed pose or a fascinating character he observed on the street, and he also made sketches to work out the expression or stance of figures destined for prints or paintings. He may have drawn the figures on this sheet from life, but the costume of the old woman viewed from several angles as well as her pose and the pose of the young man in the center suggest that they were ultimately intended as studies for biblical characters. In a few loose strokes of iron-gall ink, Rembrandt masterfully communicated surprise in the old woman at the top and humble submissiveness in the man at the center. Both these sketches relate loosely to figures in Rembrandt's etching The Angel Departing from Tobit's Family, dated 1641, and may represent his initial thoughts for these characters. The combination of broad pen strokes (in the drapery) and more refined lines (in the face of the old woman at the top and on the right) is typical of Rembrandt's drawing style of the late 1630s.

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