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Rembrandt | Britain’s Discovery of the Master

Britain’s Discovery of the Master, an exclusive new exhibition that will only be shown in Edinburgh, reveals how the taste for Rembrandt’s work in Britain evolved over the past 400 years.

The artist’s genius was equally apparent in his mastery of printmaking and drawing as in his painting; alongside 16 key works in oil (and further oils by his workshop) will be an extensive selection of more 13 fine drawings and more than 20 prints, including some of his most celebrated etchings, such as Christ Presented to the People (1655), The Three Trees (1643) and Portrait of Jan Six (1647).

Among the British artists represented in the exhibition will be William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), both of whom betray a heavy debt to Rembrandt, seen here in works such as Reynolds’s Self-Portrait when Young (1753-8). Reynolds also wrote extensively about Rembrandt’s work and was an avid collector of it himself (A Man in Armour (1655), which he owned, will be on loan from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum). Reynolds helped to burn Rembrandt’s fame in the British psyche, and it has endured through the nineteenth and twentieth century to the present day. The exhibition will include a powerful version of A Woman bathing in a Stream (1654) by the renowned British painter Leon Kossoff (b.1926), as well as the work of artists such as John Bellany (1942-2013), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), and Frank Auerbach (b.1931).
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