Supper at Emmaus

Entry

After Christ’s Resurrection, two of his apostles met him on the road to Emmaus. During the meal they later shared, Christ blessed the bread, shared it out, and only then did they recognize him (Luke 24:28-32).

This moment of recognition has often been depicted, including by Rembrandt, who made paintings, etchings and drawings of this subject both early and late in his career, as in the painting dated 1629 in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris (inv. no. 409),⁶ the etching dated 1634 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-159),⁷ the painting dated 1648 in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 1739),⁸ and the etching dated 1654 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1962-46).⁹ A drawing of the subject in the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA (inv. no. 1968.18),¹⁰ is not a ‘spontaneous’ pen drawing, but a copy or imitation, made over a sketch in black chalk. Another problematic drawing, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. 2139),¹¹ which depicts Christ Vanishing at the Supper at Emmaus and which was reproduced in facsimile by Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798) and Christiaan Josi (1768-1828), is considered by some to be a copy or a pupil’s drawing and by others to be an authentic work by Rembrandt from circa 1640-41.¹²

Representations of this scene from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are mainly based on a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) of the same subject (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-1352)¹³ or on Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper. In 1635 Rembrandt made two signed copies of the latter, one in pen and ink now in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 3769),¹⁴ and the other in red chalk in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. 1975.1.794).¹⁵ In Rembrandt’s copies after Leonardo, Christ is seated behind a table, seen straight on, flanked by figures seated in different poses to the left and right. In his early painting in the Musée Jacquemart-André, however, and in his etching of 1634, Rembrandt departed from the traditional composition: Christ is not seated in the middle but to the right of the table. By the time of his later representations, he had returned to the symmetrical composition. A copy after Leonardo’s Last Supper in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 1369),¹⁶ was recently attributed by Bevers to Rembrandt pupil Arent de Gelder (1645-1727).

Some authors consider the present drawing to be a study for the etching of 1654, but the only similar figure is that of Christ with his arms outstretched. The innkeeper standing behind the table seems, according to Stechow and Henkel, to have been borrowed from a painted composition by Titian in the Louvre (inv. no. 746), which may have become more widely known through a reproductive print of 1656 by François Chauveau (1613-1676) (e.g. London, British Museum, inv. no. 1898,0215.16).¹⁷ In the Chauveau print, the innkeeper looks down to his right, at the seated figure to Christ’s right, and if this print – whose date Henkel incorrectly cited as 1654 – was one of the models for the drawing, it was made two years after the etching and cannot be seen as a study for it. The museum’s drawing has a messy appearance, and the handling of form is awkward: the figure of Christ has some allure, but the man seated to his right seems deformed, with excessively high shoulders. Rembrandt would never have made a drawing like this: he always convincingly suggested the forms even if he did not precisely render them.

The authenticity of the drawing has long been questioned,¹⁸ with most scholars assuming that it was made by someone other than Rembrandt after rather than before the etching of 1654. The same paper and ink were used for the View of the Amstelveensewg outside Amsterdam (inv. no. RP-T-1961-85), which is generally dated circa 1660-62. The Supper at Emmaus may have been made in the same period by a pupil using the same material.¹⁹

Peter Schatborn, 2018