Note: this entry covers the same print as 'rembrandt-hundred-guilder-print' under its alternative title 'Christ Healing the Sick.' The Hundred Guilder Print is Rembrandt's supreme achievement in etching, combining nearly every technique available to the printmaker into a single work of overwhelming tonal and theological complexity. Executed around 1647-49, the print measures 28.1 by 39.3 centimeters and is composed on a copper plate that Rembrandt worked and reworked over a period of years, layering drypoint, burin work, and acid-bitten etching to achieve a range of tone and texture unmatched in the Dutch Golden Age.
The biblical source is Matthew 19, nearly in its entirety. Rembrandt did not illustrate a single episode but created a synthesis - an impossible scene that compresses multiple moments from the chapter into one continuous space. On the right, Christ stands in a spotlight of divine radiance, his arm extended in blessing or healing. Around him: the sick and lame reaching toward him from the shadows at far right; at left, Pharisees arguing in a huddle, lit differently from Christ's group; at center and lower, mothers with children pressing forward, one mother holding an infant, another child being embraced. A rich young man, perhaps the one who went away sad (Matthew 19:22), stands at the left edge.
The title 'Hundred Guilder Print' is not Rembrandt's own but was applied after his death, based on the legendary price - one hundred guilders - that the print commanded when Rembrandt is said to have bought back a proof at auction to use as trade for another work. In the seventeenth century this was an extraordinary sum for a print, reflecting the work's immediate recognition as exceptional. It was printed in small editions, partly because the drypoint burr on the copper plate wore away quickly, and early impressions (particularly from the first state) were sought immediately by collectors.
Rembrandt's technique in this print represents the fullest deployment of chiaroscuro in printmaking. Christ's figure is surrounded by light that has no visible source - the divine radiance that the Gospels associate with his presence, translated into the tonal vocabulary of ink on paper. The Pharisees at the left are rendered in a flatter, more linear style than the sick and the children, a deliberate technical differentiation that corresponds to their theological status: they see the surface of things, argue about rules, and remain outside the light. The sick and the children are drawn with more tender, atmospheric line, their bodies dissolving slightly at the edges into the shadows from which they reach toward healing.
The decision to set the scene at night or in deep shadow - there is no conventional outdoor daylight in the print - concentrates maximum emotional intensity on the light emanating from Christ. This is consistent with Rembrandt's broader theology of divine illumination: in his etchings and paintings, divine presence consistently appears as light that enters from outside the scene's natural lighting conditions, a light that is simultaneously physical and spiritual, visible and theological.
The commission context for the Hundred Guilder Print is unknown; it may have been self-initiated rather than commissioned. Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter and had deep knowledge of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament; his etching studio attracted collectors from across Europe and the Jewish community of Amsterdam. The print's integration of Matthew 19's entire sweep - children, healing, Pharisees, wealth, the kingdom of heaven - suggests a sustained meditative engagement with the chapter rather than the illustration of a single dramatic episode.
The print exists in two states, with the second (the more commonly seen) showing additional reworking around the edges and adjustments to the drypoint burr. A small number of first-state impressions survive in major print collections including the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Rijksmuseum holds the copper plate itself - a unique survival that enables modern re-printings.
The theological range of Matthew 19 - children, healing, wealth, the last being first - made Rembrandt's synthesis unusually resonant with Reformed Protestant piety, which emphasized the accessibility of Christ to all human conditions. The print circulated widely among Protestant collectors and was used devotionally as well as aesthetically. Its combination of technical virtuosity with pastoral warmth made it a touchstone for later printmakers including Goya and Piranesi.
Further reading: Christopher White, Rembrandt as an Etcher; Erik Hinterding and Jaco Rutgers, Rembrandt: The New Hollstein (complete catalogue raisonne of etchings); Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes; Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings; The Rijksmuseum's online catalogue entry for the Hundred Guilder Print (object BK-1993-14).
The Hundred Guilder Print's influence on subsequent biblical illustration and printmaking was immediate and sustained. William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, and eventually Pablo Picasso all acknowledged Rembrandt's print as the benchmark for tonal complexity in printmaking - not primarily for its religious content, which they approached differently, but for its technical achievement. The print's capacity to render the entire human range of experience - suffering, authority, innocence, arrogance, poverty, power - within a single composition unified by a central light source became the template for the ambitious narrative print in Western tradition. That this template originated in a meditation on Matthew 19 - a chapter about children, healing, and the difficulty of wealth before the kingdom - means that the entire secular tradition of ambitious printmaking carries, embedded in its technical foundations, the imprint of a biblical text.
The Hundred Guilder Print's treatment of physical suffering is also theologically distinctive in its refusal to idealize. The sick and lame who reach toward Christ in Rembrandt's composition are not stylized sufferers but specific, individualized human bodies in various stages of illness and deformity: a man on a stretcher, a figure on crutches, a hunched woman with her face upturned. This specificity of suffering - each body its own particular expression of need - corresponds to Matthew 19:2's note that 'large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.' The crowd that Matthew describes as large and undifferentiated, Rembrandt paints as a multitude of specific individuals, each with their own particular darkness, each reaching toward the same light.