Drawing in Rembrandt's day

The Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is exhibiting more than a hundred drawings by seventeenth-century Netherlandish artists from the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. They include exceptional sheets by Rembrandt as well as masterpieces by many of his predecessors and contemporaries. It will be the first time that most of the drawings return to the city, and in some cases to the very house, where they were made. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to admire the magnificent and extremely fragile works on paper before they are stored away. Some of the drawings in the exhibition have a special relationship to Rembrandt's graphic oeuvre. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was an etcher, as well as a painter, and draughtsman. Remarkably few of his preliminary studies have survived, but the Hamburger Kunsthalle has two of them: the preparatory drawings for the print of 'St Jerome Reading in a Landscape' and 'Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.'