Jan Lutma, Goldsmith

This first state-impression of Jan Lutma is a rare maculature. A maculature is a second impression taken from a plate without re-inking it. By this point, most of the ink has been transferred onto the sheet of paper printed before. This leaves only a residual layer of ink in the lines of the plate, resulting in a much paler impression, when passed through the press again. Rembrandt’s intention in printing these maculatures is not fully understood. While such additional printings could have been a way of cleaning an etching plate after it has been printed, this does not explain the existence of only a small number of examples, nor why they would have been printed on perfectly good paper, if they only served a very mundane and practical purpose. In addition, the number of surviving maculatures are largely confined to this subject. Nicholas Stogdon records eight: Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; British Museum, London; Biblioteque nationale, Paris; Duthuit, Paris; Albertina, Vienna (two); and one other (Christie’s, London, 1 July 1987, lot 166). The Rembrandt collector and scholar Dmitri Rovinsky (1824-1895) suggested that Rembrandt intended to rework these maculatures in brush and ink and sell them as drawings (Stogdon, 2011, p. 208), although to our knowledge no such example has been traced. Whatever the explanation, a maculature of this important subject is an interesting curiosity within the artist's output - and would possibly have been prized even in Rembrandt's own time just for this reason - but it also offers fascinating insights into the underlying structure of the image itself. It is like seeing a building under construction, without façade or cladding. We see every line the artist made on the plate to build up the image, unobscured by all the ink and burr which together make the beautifully tonal portrait as Rembrandt had intended it (see lot 51).