Engraving after Rembrandt’s etched Self-Portrait

In creating our entry for CAT 200 we knew (from Mumford) that Melville owned a print after Rembrandt’s The Woman taken in Adultery but we did not know who had engraved the print that is currently untraced. Here we know that Melville owned “a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits” (Mumford 336) but we don’t know which of the artist’s dozens of self-portraits was the subject of the print. We have therefore chosen to feature in this entry a self-portrait by Rembrandt that would have been well-known to Melville because it was reproduced in two books that he acquired while building his print collection. In addition being engraved as the frontispiece in Meville’s copy of John William Mollett’s 1882 book on Rembrandt (see above), the same self-portrait had been engraved as the opening image the essay on Rembrandt in the copy of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871 (fig. 1).

Rembrandt’s skill with the etching needle is self-evident in the self-portrait from 1639 that was eventually to inspire the frontispiece in Melville’s copy of Mollett’s Rembrandt and the engraving that opens the essay on Rembrandt in his copy of Works. In the etching itself (fig. 2) one sees extraordinary delicacy and strength with which he depicts himself on a window sill in rich fabrics whose texture and tone carry the eye down from the lightness of the face through the darkness of the shoulder and the folds at the elbow all the way to the end of the thumb before traveling diagonally up to the gaze of the face and the tilt of the hat. What a challenge and inspiration for each of the nineteenth-century engravers to emulate in reproductions that will be reversed in orientation from the original etching. 

The engravers who illustrated Melville’s nineteenth-century artbooks were not the only artists to use Rembrandt’s 1639 etching as the inspiration for their own artwork. In 1640, one year after making the etching, Rembrandt used it as a model for his self-portrait in oil on canvas at the age of 34 (fig. 3). The pose is similar, the angle only slightly different. The window sill is more clear than in the etching, and the flesh of the hand and the face harmonize more fully with the smooth dark brown of the jacket and the glowing gold of the background. In the pride of the pose and the glow of the color, young Rembrandt is depicting himself in the company of portraits by Raphael and Titian. This painting became a favorite soon after its arrival at the London’s National Gallery in 1861, too late for Melville to have seen it during his three visits to the gallery in 1849.