Object data
pen and brown ink, with opaque white; contours indented for transfer; framing line in brown ink
height 147 mm × width 177 mm
Rembrandt van Rijn
Christ Healing a Leper
Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655
Inscriptions
Technical notes
Watermark: Foolscap
Condition
Light foxing throughout1
Provenance
...; collection Graaf Jan Pieter van Suchtelen (1751-1836), St Petersburg (L. 2332); ...; collection Remigius Adrianus Haanen [van Haanen] (1812-94), Vienna;2 ? his student Hermine Lang-Laris (1842-1913), Munich; from whom purchased, with nine other drawings, by Dr Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), The Hague, 1900;3 by whom donated to the museum, 1906, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1930
Object number: RP-T-1930-24
Credit line: Gift of C. Hofstede de Groot, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Leiden 1606 - Amsterdam 1669)
After attending Latin school in his native Leiden, Rembrandt, the son of a miller, enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, but soon abandoned his studies to become an artist. He first trained (1621-23) under the Leiden painter Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg (c. 1571-1638), followed by six months with the Amsterdam history painter Pieter Lastman (c. 1583-1633). Returning to Leiden around 1624, he shared a studio with Jan Lievens, where he aimed to establish himself as a history painter, winning the admiration of the poet and courtier Constantijn Huygens. In 1628 Gerard Dou (1613-75) became his first pupil. In the autumn of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where his career rapidly took off. Three years later he joined the Guild of St Luke and married Saskia Uylenburgh (1612-42), niece of the art dealer Hendrik Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661), in whose house he had been living and working. She died shortly after giving birth to their son Titus, by which time Rembrandt was already in financial straits owing to excessive spending on paintings, prints, antiquities and studio props for his history pieces. After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt lived first with Titus's wet nurse, Geertje Dircx (who eventually sued Rembrandt for breach of promise and was later imprisoned for her increasingly unstable behaviour), and then with his later housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels (by whom he had a daughter, Cornelia). Mounting debts made him unable to meet the payments of his house on the Jodenbreestraat and forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656 and to sell his house and art collection. In the last decade of his life, he, Hendrickje and Titus resided in more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht, but Rembrandt continued to be dogged by continuing financial difficulties. His beloved Titus died in 1668. Rembrandt survived him by only a year and was buried in the Westerkerk.
Entry
The first miracle that Christ performed after the Sermon on the Mount was the healing of a leper (Matthew 8:1-3). Christ put forward his hand and touched him, telling him to be clean. ‘And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.’ Although the Bible says that great crowds followed him, the drawing shows only Christ, the kneeling leper and two of the apostles. Christ is bending forward and stretches his hand out towards the sick man’s head. At an earlier stage, Christ took hold of the leper’s hand, but this gesture was not clear enough so it was covered with opaque white. Rembrandt heightened the power of Christ’s healing gesture by drawing the other arm inside his cloak. Christ’s feet have also been extensively covered with opaque white, but here Rembrandt chose not to draw a corrected detail. Christ’s standing pose was sufficiently clear without an exact rendering of his legs. Rembrandt made the relatively great distance between Christ and the leper seem smaller, probably as an afterthought, by drawing a rock between them. The two apostles, who along with Christ form an enclosed group, are looking on in amazement, the first with clasped hands, the second with his arm on the shoulder of the other. Between the two apostles’ heads we can see the beginnings of a third. The simple composition has been drawn with dry, sketchy lines, some of which are nearly transparent. In several places the shaded profiles have been emphasized and the areas of shadow have been indicated with widely spaced diagonal and vertical hatching.
Although Rembrandt often depicted a particular scene several times, this drawing, made in the first half of the 1650s, is the only known drawing of Christ healing a leper. A copy in the Louvre in Paris (inv. no. 22915)4 shows that it was reduced in size: there was originally more space around the group of figures, so that their isolation from their surroundings was even more striking. The copyist did not take over the first version of Christ’s hand. At other times, copies of lost drawings by Rembrandt repeat both the first rendering of the motif and the corrections, thus providing a close imitation of the missing work. Rembrandt may have taken the gesture of the apostle laying his arm on the shoulder of the other from a print by Boëtius Adamsz Bolswert published in 1622 in the Vitae Passionis et mortis Jesu Christi.5 For Rembrandt, this sort of borrowing is merely a formality: the power of suggestion inherent in his style gives the event such a human quality that compared to the print, its illustrative aspect is of secondary importance.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Matthijs Pool made an etching of the drawing (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-65.631),6 as he did of Rembrandt’s drawing Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene (inv. no. RP-T-1961-80, for which see inv. no. RP-P-OB-65.632), for his series of biblical and other scenes published under the title Verscheide gedachten. In both cases, Pool indented the most important contours of Rembrandt’s original with a stylus, so he must have had access to a group of autograph drawings, including both of these sheets, which had probably remained together after the sale of Rembrandt’s collection in 1658.
Peter Schatborn, 2017
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1270; W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, I (1925), no. 412 (c. 1660); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. The Hague 1942, no. 67 (1654-55); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 1026 (c. 1656-57); P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. The Hague 1985, no. 43, with earlier literature; A. Blankert et al., Rembrandt: A Genius and his Impact, exh. cat. Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria)/Canberra (National Gallery of Australia) 1997-98, no. 88; S. Hautekeete, with P. Schatborn, Tekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn leerlingen in de verzameling van Jean de Grez, exh. cat. Brussels (Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België) 2005, p. 112, under no. 37, fig. 1; M. Schapelhouman, Rembrandt and the Art of Drawing, Amsterdam 2006, p. 102, fig. 98; L. de Witt et al., Rembrandt et la figure du Christ, exh. cat. Paris (Musée du Louvre) and elsewhere 2011-12, no. 48
Citation
P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Healing a Leper, Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28561
(accessed 1 January 2025 20:12:41).