Art History Class

Listen to part of a lecture from an art history class.

P: Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to start this lecture off with a simple question. I'm sure you've all heard of Rembrandt, the Dutch artist... right? Well, um, what mediums did he work in?

S: Oil, right? He was most famous for his oil paintings.

P: Absolutely. Do you know of any other mediums that he used? No? Well, let me tell you then. Not so many people know that Rembrandt was an accomplished etcher. What can you tell me about etching?

  etch: corrode, 삭각

S: Don't you use a knife or a sharp tool or something to cut into metal?

P: Not quite, but close. You're thinking about metal engraving. I'll bet. Well, first of all, when doing an etching you do need a plate made of copper or zinc. Um, you don't carve directly into the plate, though. You cover it with a kind of waxy substance first, called a ground, which you heat up and spread all over your piece of metal. After it dries, then you're ready to do your actual drawing. When you're carving lines out of the ground... engraving them... you've got to make sure that you cut all the way through it to expose the metal. That's because once you're finished engraving the ground, you're going to dip the entire plate into an acid bath. What the acid does is ... it doesn't eat away the wax, but it does corrode the parts of the metal plate that are exposed. That's why all the wax has to be gone from the parts you want etched. Uh, is everyone still with me? OK. So after you've given the etching an acid bath, you've got to remove the wax. Then, to make the actual prints, you spread the ink all over the etching, and then sort of squeegee the ink off the flat parts of the plate. What this does is push the ink into the bites of your etching-the bites are the parts that are carved into the metal. After wiping the excess ink from the surface, you take a slightly damp piece of print paper, place it over the engraved plate, and run it through your press. And, voila! You have a print of your etching.

  eat away: to destroy as if by eating 

  squeegee : a rubber roller

  voilà : a French expression of satisfaction

OK. Before we move on, I want to talk about one of the most important figures in the early history of etching...a man by the name of, excuse my pronunciation, Jacques Callot. You can see a picture of him in your textbook. He had a tremendous impact on the technical side of things before Rembrandt's time. The first big improvement he made was his use of a different type of ground. Before he came along, engravers used regular wax, which caused a lot of problems because it was too soft and porous. Callot used a harder type of varnish―this stuff was normally used by craftsmen making lutes―and it solved the problems etchers had with conventional wax.

  varnish: polish, glaze (to be painted onto wood or other material to give it a hard, clear, shiny surface)

  lute: a stringed instrument like a guitar

His other big innovation was the creation of a new tool called―again, with the pronunciation―an èchoppe. It was a special etching tool that looked, well. it looked a lot like the tip of a fountain pen. Do you know what I'm talking about? For those of you who've used a fountain pen, you know that sometimes the writing will be really thin, and then in other places it gets all thick. That was the purpose of Callot's invention of the èchoppe. He wanted a way to make lines that could vary in size... With an etching needle, it was just too difficult to do this. By twisting the tool, he could control the thickness of the bites that would appear in the plate.

  fountain pen: 만년필

Now that we've covered the etching process, let's move back to Rembrandt. As we discussed earlier, he was quite an expert at etching. In fact, during his lifetime, he was much more well-known for his prints...collectors were paying high prices for them even back then. If you look at Rembrandt's entire career as an etcher, it's easy to see the way his skills and technique developed. At first... in the 1620s and early 1630s... his work consisted of very little detail and a bunch of long, really pronounced strokes. As he became more comfortable with the medium, though, he was truly able to display his talents.

  pronounced: very noticeable 

It's worth noting here that the subject matter of his etchings didn't vary much from his paintings. There were a few landscapes, a lot of portraits... and quite a bit of religious imagery. I'd say that the latter account for about a third of his etchings. In fact, during his lifetime Rembrandt's most popular work was probably Hundred Guilder Print, which dealt with strictly religious themes. It got that name because that was the price a collector was willing to pay for it at the time.

One of the very unique things about this print, if you look at the slide, is that it depicts a sort of amalgam of several different scenes from the Bible. If you know about that kind of stuff, you'll recognize much of it from chapter 19 of the book of Matthew. In the center of the etching, uh , you can see the figure of Jesus with an aura of light surrounding him... the light coming from him illuminates most of the painting and allows Rembrandt to show off his tremendous shadowing skills. OK, in the middle of things, Jesus is healing the sick. And, if you take a look in the upper corner, you can see some people looking on a bit scornfully... those are the Pharisees, who element in the print is to the far right... you can kind of make out a figure who is leaving through the tunnel. Again, this gives Rembrandt a change to subtly apply some lighting effects to his etching...but, yeah, this depiction represents a man who was convinced to give up all his worldly possessions. As you can see, Rembrandt took three different elements from the Bible and combined them into a single work.

This etching is huge in scope and took Rembrandt six years to complete, off nad on. It is considered to be the pinnacle of his career as an etcher, and whoever bought the prints for one hundred guilders... little did they know what they were actually getting.