The Hundred Guilder Print - officially titled Christ Preaching, though also known as La Petite Tombe from a later printmaker who added a stone monument to his own copy - is Rembrandt's supreme achievement in printmaking and one of the defining works of the Dutch Golden Age. Executed in etching with drypoint and burin on a copper plate measuring 28.1 by 39.3 centimeters, the print synthesizes nearly the entire content of Matthew 19 into a single panoramic composition unified by the supernatural radiance of Christ's figure at center-left.
The title 'Hundred Guilder Print' is a posthumous coinage derived from an anecdote recorded by the print dealer and biographer Arnold Houbraken: at an auction where the print appeared, Rembrandt allegedly traded another work to buy back a proof copy, and the equivalent value in guilders - one hundred - was applied as a nickname reflecting the work's exceptional market value. In the mid-seventeenth century, one hundred guilders was the price of a modest painting; for a print to command such a sum was extraordinary, indicating the immediate recognition of the work's technical and artistic primacy.
The biblical source is Matthew 19 in its entirety. The chapter begins with Jesus leaving Galilee for Judea (verse 1), where he healed the sick (verse 2) and was tested by the Pharisees on questions of divorce (verses 3-9). The disciples brought children to Jesus, whom the disciples tried to turn away before Jesus intervened: 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these' (verse 14). A rich young ruler asked how to inherit eternal life and 'went away sad, because he had great wealth' (verse 22). Jesus spoke of the difficulty of the rich entering the kingdom of heaven (verse 24). Rembrandt depicted all of this in a single scene.
At the composition's left, the Pharisees cluster in discussion, rendered in a more linear, flatter style than the other figures - technically differentiated to indicate their different spiritual status. At center, Christ stands in a pool of light that has no natural source, his arm extended toward the sick and lame who press forward from the deep shadow at the right. Mothers with children occupy the foreground center; a camel - the animal Jesus had just mentioned in the parable of the needle's eye - is dimly visible in the far background. The rich young ruler, well-dressed and isolated, stands at the left edge, turning away.
Rembrandt's deployment of chiaroscuro in this print is its most technically complex feature. The copper plate was worked with acid biting for the etched lines, drypoint for the soft, furry shadow areas (drypoint produces a burr on the copper that holds extra ink and creates velvety blacks), and a burin for the crisper lines in lighter areas. This combination of techniques in a single plate was not standard practice; Rembrandt developed it across a career of printmaking experimentation as the most flexible approach to tonal complexity. The result is a tonal range from absolute black - where the sick crowd dissolves into shadow - to near-white, where the divine light falls on Christ and on the upturned faces of children.
The print's commission context is unknown, but its sustained meditation on a single chapter of Matthew suggests extended private engagement rather than a commissioned illustration. Rembrandt had been living in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter since the 1630s and was deeply familiar with the dynamics of Torah debate, the gathering of crowds around a teacher, and the relationship between religious authority and popular following. His Christ-as-rabbi in the Hundred Guilder Print reflects this environmental knowledge.
Two states of the print exist, with the first (showing cleaner drypoint lines before the burr wore down) the more valuable and sought-after. The copper plate itself survives in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - an extraordinary archival resource that has enabled modern re-printings and technical study of Rembrandt's methods. Major impressions are held in the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and numerous European print cabinets.
The theological reception of the Hundred Guilder Print in Reformed Protestant culture was immediate and sustained. Its synthesis of healing, welcome, controversy, wealth and poverty into a single Christ-centered scene mirrored the Reformed emphasis on the totality of Christ's ministry and the accessibility of the gospel to all human conditions. The print circulated as a devotional object as well as a collector's item.
Further reading: Christopher White, Rembrandt as an Etcher; Erik Hinterding and Jaco Rutgers, Rembrandt: The New Hollstein; Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings; Rijksmuseum online catalogue entry; Martin Bailey, Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder Print (Wallace Collection catalogue essay).
The theological coherence of the Hundred Guilder Print as a reading of Matthew 19 repays extended attention. The chapter opens with Jesus's departure from Galilee - a geographical movement that signals increasing exposure to opposition - and proceeds through controversies about divorce, the welcome of children, and the problem of wealth before ending with the disciples' bewilderment and Peter's question about reward (verse 27). Rembrandt includes all of these registers in his single composition without separating them: the Pharisees and the children and the sick are literally in the same space, because in Matthew 19 they are in the same theological space - all facing the same question about the kingdom of heaven and what it costs to enter it. The print's visual coherence is a theological argument: these are not separate issues but a single question about what human beings will give up, and receive, in the presence of Christ.
The copper plate for the Hundred Guilder Print, still held by the Rijksmuseum, has been used to print new impressions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising the philosophically interesting question of what constitutes an authentic impression of the print. Early seventeenth-century impressions, made before the drypoint burr wore down, have a different tonal quality from later impressions pulled from the same plate; modern impressions made after the plate was acquired by the Rijksmuseum have their own distinct quality. The plate is both a unique historical artifact and an ongoing instrument of reproduction - a situation that has no parallel in painting and that connects directly to the theological theme of the print: the possibility of repeated access to a presence that illuminates, through a medium that multiplies rather than restricts.