The Hundred Guilder Print

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Hundred Guilder Print can be counted among Rembrandt’s most beautiful and complex compositions. The artist wove together in a horizontal composition individual episodes of the Gospel of St. Matthew to illustrate its full chapter 19. It is an exquisite puzzle of darks against lights and lights against darks that draw the eye across the image. He positioned Christ as a luminous beacon between the lightly etched left side and the sumptuous darkness he created on the right. After the scene was first etched onto the plate, he continued to reposition many of the details; traces of that repositioning can still be seen in Christ's eyes, hands, and feet. The title of the print refers to an early story that Rembrandt paid one hundred guilders to buy back an impression of the print. While the tale is dubious, it does suggest that the print had become rare by the eighteenth century.

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