Enfilade

Upcoming exhibition at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart:

Rembrandt’s Shadow: England and the Black Art
Rembrandts Schatten: England und die Schwarze Kunst
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 18 September 2016 — 8 January 2017

Richard Earlom, after Joseph Wright of Derby, An Iron Forge, detail, 1771, mezzotint (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart).

The œuvre of Rembrandt (1606–1669) was of key importance for the development of English art in the eighteenth century. The expressive orchestration of light in his paintings and particularly the radical chiaroscuro of his etchings were compared to the mezzotint, a method that emerged later and advanced to become the quintessential English printing technique (the ‘English Manner’). Also referred to as the ‘black art’ on account of its strong light-dark contrasts, the mezzotint has always possessed a mysterious and magical quality. Particularly Rembrandt’s portraits had a great influence on England’s most prominent artists, for example Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, for their part, came to serve as models of artistic self-staging par excellence, and were often quoted. Rembrandt’s Shadow will thus embrace a compositional as well as a temporal component: the masterful chiaroscuro of his art and its aftereffect in  eighteenth-century England.