Christ Preaching, Healing the Sick, and Blessing the Children ("The Hundred Guilder Print")

Rembrandt's largest and most technically ambitious etching, combining three episodes from Matthew 19 - Christ blessing the children, healing the sick, and debating the Pharisees on divorce - into a single scene built from the deepest blacks and the most delicate, unworked whites he ever set side by side on one plate. He did not sign or date it. Its popular name comes from a price of 100 guilders reported for it within his own lifetime, but the more colorful version of that story, that Rembrandt himself paid the sum to buy back his own print, has no primary source that this record's research could locate; Rembrandt scholar Seymour Slive said plainly that he had been unable to find who paid it, and this record treats the buy-back tale as unverified legend rather than settled fact.

The plate survived Rembrandt by more than a century, wearing down under repeated printing, before it passed to the London collector and amateur engraver Captain William Baillie in 1775. Baillie reworked it by his own hand, pulled about a hundred impressions from the reworked whole, then cut the copper into four pieces, reworked each fragment again, and printed the pieces separately, permanently ending the plate's existence as a single image. Impressions therefore fall into distinct, physically different classes: a very rare first state (perhaps nine impressions survive, two of them in the British Museum), a common lifetime and early-posthumous second state, and later Baillie-state and cut-fragment impressions that carry an eighteenth-century hand alongside Rembrandt's. This record centers on the National Gallery of Art's impression, from the Rosenwald Collection, and treats one richly documented English impression, now at the Morgan Library, as a separate, individually sourced chain rather than folding the two together.

What the print shows and how it is built

The sheet compresses three separate episodes from a single chapter of Matthew's Gospel into one continuous scene set outside a rocky opening, with Christ standing at the center as the hinge between them. At the left, in the print's most lightly worked passage, Pharisees debate a point of law among themselves while women bring their children forward to be blessed; a bearded, balding figure usually read as Peter tries to push the children back and is answered by Christ's raised hand. Immediately beside them stands a solitary, richly dressed young man, head bowed in thought, understood as the rich young man of the same chapter, told to sell his possessions and follow Christ. At the right, in the densest and darkest passage on the plate, the sick, the lame and the destitute crowd forward to be healed, rendered in some of the heaviest drypoint burr and the richest plate tone Rembrandt ever pulled from a single copper.

The technical range is the point. Rembrandt worked the left side of the composition in an open, sketch-like line closer to drawing than to engraving, and the right side in a dense accumulation of etched line, drypoint burr and burnished correction that reads, in a well-inked, well-wiped impression, as an almost unbroken field of velvet black shading up through every intermediate grey to the near-white paper around Christ's head and the children. No other single plate in Rembrandt's output holds that range of finish and unfinish side by side on purpose.

The biblical program, and what it does not require

The subject is not obscure and does not need to be decoded. Matthew 19 moves in sequence from the Pharisees questioning Christ on divorce, to the blessing of children brought to him despite the disciples' objection, to the rich young man who cannot give up his wealth, to Christ healing the multitudes who follow him. Rembrandt's composition compresses that sequence into one continuous space rather than a strip of separate scenes, an unusual and demanding compositional choice for a print of this size, but the underlying textual source is the biblical chapter itself, directly and without a secondary program layered on top. Scholarship on the print is largely agreed on this identification; the argument in the literature concerns how skilfully and unusually the three moments are fused into one field of action, not what the individual episodes are.

This record found no scholarly claim of a hidden doctrinal, alchemical or esoteric program beneath the surface subject, and none is asserted here. What can be said with the same evidentiary weight as an iconographic finding is that the choice of Matthew 19 as a single, fused composition - rather than the standard multi-panel or sequential treatment of the same material elsewhere in Netherlandish art - is itself Rembrandt's most significant interpretive decision on this sheet, and it is a decision about pictorial construction, not about concealed doctrine.

When it was made, and the limits of that dating

No source consulted for this record found a date or monogram scratched into the plate. The print's date is a scholarly reconstruction, not a fact read off the object. The range most institutions now use is c. 1647-1649: the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Denver Art Museum each place it at or near 1648, and the Metropolitan Museum's catalogue entry gives 1649. Watermark analysis, distinguishing the different papers on which surviving sheets were pulled, indicates that impressions datable to Rembrandt's own lifetime were printed from around 1647-48 onward, which is the closest this record's sources come to pinning down when finished sheets actually left the studio.

Separately, some general accounts describe the plate as the product of a much longer gestation, worked on intermittently across the 1640s as what one writer called the critical work at the middle of Rembrandt's career. This record could not trace that longer chronology to a specific documentary source, as opposed to a stylistic argument about where the print sits in Rembrandt's development, and states the shorter, better-evidenced watermark-based range as the primary claim, with the longer gestation noted as a secondary, less firmly sourced position rather than dropped outright.

The states of the plate, and why two catalogues disagree on the count

Two states of Rembrandt's own, unaltered plate are recognized by every source consulted. The first state lacks the diagonal hatching later added to the neck of the donkey at the lower left of the composition; it is extremely rare, with only about nine impressions known, two of which are in the British Museum. The second state adds that hatching along with further reworking, and is the state of nearly every lifetime and early-posthumous impression in public collections, including the sheets examined directly for this record at the Rijksmuseum and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Where sources diverge is on how many states to count in total. Christopher White and Karel Boon's 1969 catalogue raisonne, following the older Bartsch and Hind numbering, describes the print as surviving in these two states of Rembrandt's own plate and treats William Baillie's later reworking as a separate matter, outside the plate's states as Rembrandt left it. The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish catalogue (Hinterding and Rutgers, 2013), numbering the print as entry 239, instead extends the same sequence to four states by counting Baillie's large reworked edition of the whole plate, printed around 1775 before he cut it up, as a third state, and the impressions taken from the four cut and further-reworked fragments as a fourth. A specific lot offered at Bonhams in 2024, a Baillie-period impression, was catalogued under this system as New Hollstein's third state. The disagreement is not a trivial numbering quirk: it is a real scholarly question about whether a plate substantially reworked by another hand, a century after the artist's death, still belongs in the same state sequence as the artist's own print, or should be catalogued as a related but distinct object. This record follows White and Boon's narrower sense of state for Rembrandt's own two states, and describes the Baillie material as what it physically is, a reworking and dismemberment of the original plate, rather than folding it silently into the same numbered sequence.

The name: what is actually documented, and what is legend

The earliest evidence found for a high price attached to this print during Rembrandt's own lifetime is a letter of 9 February 1654 from the engraver Jan Meyssens of Antwerp to Carel van den Bosch, bishop of Bruges, describing an impression of the print as very fine and lovely, but noting that it ought to cost thirty guilders, while remarking that in Holland it had been sold various times for 100 guilders and more. This is a contemporary, dated, named document, and it establishes that a market price near or above 100 guilders was already attached to the print within Rembrandt's own lifetime. It does not say that Rembrandt himself paid that price, to anyone, for anything.

A second early reference, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach's travel diary of 1711, records only that the print once brought that high a price at an auction, again without naming a buyer. The specific, often-repeated story that Rembrandt personally bought back an impression of his own print for 100 guilders is traced by the Rembrandt scholar Christopher White to a later account involving the Paris print dealer Pierre-Jean Mariette; a different early account, in Edme-Francois Gersaint's 1751 catalogue raisonne of Rembrandt's etchings, the first catalogue raisonne compiled for any artist, gives a third and incompatible version, in which Rembrandt is said to have obtained the print not for cash but in exchange for a complete set of engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi that a seller had wanted 100 florins for. Seymour Slive, whose scholarship on Rembrandt's early critical reception is the closest thing to a systematic check of these claims that this record could trace, stated plainly that he had been unable to learn which collector or dealer paid 100 guilders for the etching. No source consulted for this record supplies a primary document naming Rembrandt as either buyer or seller in a 100-guilder transaction for his own print.

The honest state of the evidence, then, is this: a documented market price near 100 guilders existed during Rembrandt's lifetime, attested by a named contemporary in a dated letter; the popular embellishment that Rembrandt bought back his own etching at that price is a later, unverified, and internally inconsistent tradition, with at least two incompatible tellings (Mariette's cash purchase and Gersaint's trade for the Marcantonio set) and no primary source connecting either version to a real transaction. This record states the anecdote as legend, not fact, and records its verification as an open question rather than repeating it as settled history.

What 100 guilders meant

A skilled Dutch craftsman in the mid-seventeenth century, a mason or master carpenter, typically earned in the region of one guilder a day and on the order of 400 to 600 guilders a year; a schoolmaster or clerk might earn 700 to 1,000 guilders annually. On those figures, 100 guilders represents roughly two to three months of a skilled craftsman's income, or close to a comfortable year's household rent in a city like Delft in the same period, where paintings priced between 100 and 200 guilders were themselves already described as costing several months of a craftsman's wages. A price at or above 100 guilders for a single printed sheet, rather than a painting, was a genuinely startling sum by the standards of the ordinary print trade, which is presumably why Meyssens' 1654 letter singles the print out for comment in the first place, independent of whether any particular buy-back anecdote attached to it is true.

Early fame and reception

Independent of the naming legend, the print was recognized as exceptional as soon as it existed. Amy Golahny's study of its early reception describes it as well known to collectors as soon as it was made, and argues that Jan Steen's Village Wedding of 1653, only a few years after the plate's likely completion, represents one of the earliest visual responses by another artist to Rembrandt's composition, at a moment when Golahny describes the print as circulating among collectors and at auction in a select and controlled way, rather than as a widely available commercial sheet. That combination, a print famous almost immediately but genuinely hard to obtain, is consistent with the Meyssens letter's report of an inflated resale price within the same decade, whatever the truth of any specific purchase story.

The plate after Rembrandt: reworking, and the plate's physical end

The copper plate survived Rembrandt's death in 1669 and continued to be printed from for more than a century, wearing progressively as repeated pulls dulled its finer lines; no source consulted for this record names a documented owner of the plate for that intervening span. By 1775 it had passed, worn, to the painter and engraver John Greenwood, from whom the London-based Irish soldier, collector and amateur printmaker Captain William Baillie (1723-1810) purchased it that year.

Baillie reworked the plate extensively by his own hand, restoring worn passages with what one account calls such care and intelligence that it takes an experienced eye not to mistake his retouching for the untouched original, and printed an edition of roughly one hundred impressions from the reworked whole. He then cut the plate into four separate pieces, reworked each fragment again, and printed the pieces as independent images in their own right; to the reduced central fragment showing Christ, he added an invented architectural arch that was never part of Rembrandt's design. The result is that the single copper Rembrandt worked no longer exists as a single object: it survives only as four physically separate, further-altered fragments, each carrying Baillie's eighteenth-century hand fused onto Rembrandt's seventeenth-century one. Fragments and impressions from this campaign are now dispersed across institutions including the Rijksmuseum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, each catalogued as a joint work of Rembrandt and Baillie rather than as Rembrandt alone.

This is a genuine authenticity distinction, not a curatorial nicety. A lifetime or early second-state impression is Rembrandt's print, pulled from his own working of the plate. A Baillie-period impression, whether from the reworked whole or from one of the four cut fragments, is a print from a plate that a named eighteenth-century hand deliberately altered, cut apart, and in the case of the central fragment, partly invented. Cataloguing and market practice generally keep this distinction clear by labelling Baillie-state material accordingly, and this record does the same.

Christiaan Josi: what the documented connection actually is

Christiaan Josi (1768-1828), a Utrecht-born engraver trained in London under John Raphael Smith, is not documented in any source consulted for this record as an owner of the copper plate or of the Baillie fragments; that chain runs from Greenwood to Baillie and from Baillie's own subsequent dispersal, not through Josi. Josi's real, well-documented connection to Rembrandt's etchings is as a cataloguer and dealer, one step removed from this specific print rather than a proven direct link to it.

On the death of his relation Cornelis Ploos van Amstel in 1800, Josi inherited that celebrated Amsterdam collector's holdings and, in 1810, produced a catalogue of Ploos van Amstel's collection of Rembrandt etchings, illustrated with a portrait of Rembrandt that Josi etched himself. Ploos van Amstel was one of the most important eighteenth-century Dutch collectors of Rembrandt's prints, and Josi subsequently sold that Rembrandt etching collection to the 5th Earl of Aylesford. No source consulted for this record, however, states explicitly that an impression of the Hundred Guilder Print was among the sheets in that collection or in that 1810 catalogue; this record does not assert that it was, though given the print's already-established fame by 1654 and Ploos van Amstel's stature as a Rembrandt collector, its presence in that collection would not be surprising if it could be documented. Josi later settled in London in 1819 and died at Ramsgate in November 1828; his own collection, including, according to a contemporary description of a related Thomas Lawrence sale catalogue, rare and valuable etchings by Rembrandt, was sold at auction in March 1829 in a sale that ran to a reported twelve days.

The honest summary is that Josi is a documented, named conduit through which Rembrandt etchings, in bulk, passed from an eighteenth-century Dutch collection into the nineteenth-century English trade, and a cataloguer whose 1810 volume is a primary source for Ploos van Amstel's Rembrandt holdings generally. He is not documented, in the sources this record could verify, as the owner of any specific identified impression of this print, nor as having any role in the plate's physical reworking, which belongs entirely to Baillie. Where the task brief for this record anticipated a direct Josi-to-plate connection, this record did not find one and states that plainly rather than inventing one.

This impression: the National Gallery of Art sheet

The impression at the center of this record is catalogued by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, as accession 1943.3.7173, an etching, drypoint and burin impression on Japan paper, from the Rosenwald Collection, the gift of Lessing J. Rosenwald in 1943. Rosenwald's Rembrandt holdings, like his Durer holdings recorded elsewhere in this archive, formed part of one of the largest single print and drawing gifts the Gallery has received.

This record was not able to confirm, from the sources it could directly access, this specific sheet's state within the two-state sequence described above, its individual pre-Rosenwald ownership history, or the date and manner of Rosenwald's own acquisition of it; the Gallery's own object page for this accession returned a server error in every attempt made during this research pass. That gap is recorded here as an open question rather than bridged with an assumption, consistent with the record's general practice of not asserting what its own research could not confirm.

A separately documented impression: the Morgan Library sheets

A different, individually and richly documented impression, entirely distinct from the National Gallery of Art sheet described above, is held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, catalogued in its own Rembrandt print series as RvR 115. This sheet carries a Strasbourg lily watermark, a fleur-de-lis in a shield surmounted by a crown over the letters 4 and WR, together with a separate countermark reading AV joined by a horizontal bar. Watermark and countermark evidence of exactly this kind is the physical method print scholars use to localize and date paper stocks independently of a plate's own state, since a watermark records the paper mill and period of manufacture rather than anything about the printing itself.

The Morgan sheet's provenance is unusually complete for an old master print: Sir William Knighton (1776-1836), then T. J. Thomson in the first half of the nineteenth century, then Charles J. Palmer (d. 1867) of London, then William J. White (d. c. 1870) of London, then Henry Brodhurst (c. 1860) of Dale Close and Mansfield, then the American collector George W. Vanderbilt (1862-1914), from whose estate J. Pierpont Morgan purchased it in 1905. The Morgan Library's own published record separately notes holding a second early impression of the print, RvR 116, with its own distinct history. Neither Morgan sheet is the subject of this record's current_location or lead image; they are described here as a documented comparandum precisely to avoid the error the version-safety standard for this archive warns against, blending a different sheet's individually sourced chain into the provenance claimed for the Gallery's own impression.

Where other impressions are held

Beyond the Gallery and Morgan sheets, this record directly examined institutional records for impressions held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which holds at least four: RP-P-OB-601 (Japanese paper, 282 x 395 mm, catalogued as Hollstein state 74-I), RP-P-1962-1 (Japanese paper, 270 x 387 mm, from the Mr and Mrs de Bruijn-van der Leeuw bequest, Muri, Switzerland, 1962), RP-P-OB-602 (Japanese paper, 280 x 394 mm, carrying an as-yet-unidentified collector's mark, Lugt 240), and RP-P-OB-603, an unusual maculature, a discarded or trial pull combining etching, drypoint and burin with plate tone that has been drastically reworked by hand in pen and brush, a working document of the printing process rather than a finished exhibition sheet. The Rijksmuseum also holds a Baillie-period fragment, RP-P-1957-394-C, a mirror-image copy of a section of the reworked plate, purchased in 1957 with support from the F. G. Waller-Fonds.

The British Museum in London holds, among its impressions, one of the roughly nine known first-state sheets, catalogued as showing Christ in a rocky landscape before the diagonal shading was added to the donkey's neck; this record notes its existence and its rarity but has not sourced an image of it here, since the Museum's own modern photography of its holdings is licensed for reuse only on non-commercial terms, which this archive's image policy does not accept. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a lifetime second-state impression (accession 1942.757, sheet 28.3 x 38.2 cm, bequest of John L. Severance, 1942) and a Baillie-period central-section fragment (accession 1942.116, sheet 45.3 x 23.9 cm, bequest of Julia Morgan Marlatt, 1942). The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo holds an impression on washi paper, accession G.1981-0001. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge each hold impressions as well, the Fitzwilliam's including Baillie-period material; this record was not able to retrieve the Metropolitan's own catalogue entry directly during this research pass, due to repeated server errors, and states its holding without the fuller detail a direct fetch would have supplied.

The market

This record was able to directly verify one recent auction result with hammer and premium separated: a Baillie-period impression (New Hollstein's third state of four, on laid paper carrying the Hinterding miscellaneous F.a. watermark, ex the collection of Mr and Mrs John Estabrook of Chicago) sold at Bonhams, New York, on 26 November 2024, lot 2 of sale 29523, hammering at USD 18,000 against a 28 percent buyer's premium on amounts under USD 50,000, for a total price of USD 23,040. This is a Baillie-state print, not a lifetime Rembrandt impression, and its price should be read as evidence for that specific, posthumously altered class of the object rather than as a benchmark for an early or first-state Rembrandt pull, which the market values far more highly and which appears at auction far less often; a superb and very rare impression was listed for an upcoming Sotheby's Old Master Prints sale in London in late 2025 as lot 520, though this record could not confirm an estimate or, since the sale had not concluded at the time of research, a result. Other reported sale prices for the print circulating in general market commentary were not independently verified against a source this record could fetch directly, and are omitted rather than repeated on the strength of a secondhand summary alone.