Journal Article

John the Baptist Preaching, 1808

Van Der Mullen, Manon

2017

Overview

As part of a series of articles offering information on prints and drawings acquired by the Rijks Museum, this etching and drypoint by Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine after Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn is discussed. Rembrandt’s etchings were popular among eighteenth-century followers in part because of their unusual subjects and characteristic chiaroscuro. The French artist Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine, for instance, owned prints by the Dutch master, which he touched up with a brush, as he did to works on paper by other seventeenth-century artists from the Low Countries. In this case, however, he worked not from an etching by Rembrandt, but from his painting John the Baptist Preaching. Around 1805 this canvas was in a French private collection, where Norblin may have seen it. A year earlier he had returned to Paris, having spent thirty years in Poland.

• Publisher: Rijksmuseum
• Subject: 19th century / Etching / Norblin de La Gourdaine, Jean-Pierre (1745-1830) / Prints and printmaking / Religious art / Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1669)