Watermarks have graced the pages of art historical studies since early in this century when Max Lehrs included watermark tracings in his study of Northern European prints. Such studies and the many volumes of watermark tracings by Briquet, Heawood, and others, are useful to varying degrees, but the question as to whether watermarks can provide a reliable basis for dating drawings or print impressions by an individual artist remains open.
Watermarks in Rembrant's Prints attempts to address this issue by assembling a body of information that Rembrandt scholars can use in a systematic and objective way, and by developing a methodology for the interpretation of watermark information that can be used not only for research on Rembrandt but for the study of other artists as well.
The authors, using beta-radiography to record watermarks in Rembrandt's prints, have based their cataloguing system on the degree of identity between watermarks, i.e., only when two watermarks are fully superimposible can they be viewed as being from the same mould and from the same time and place. The pioneering work done by bibliographers like Alan Stevenson is examined, with focus on the occurrence of twin moulds. The relevance of variations in watermarks to the dating of print states and impressions, and conclusions about Rembrandt's working methods are discussed.
The core of the study is the Catalogue of Rembrandt Watermarks, which organizes the information by watermark type. The volume also will contain full-size reproductions of the radiographs, and a concordance of watermarks in Rembrandt prints arranged according to the Bartsch cataloge raisonne numbers for the prints. Introductory essays by the authors and Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Director of Collections at the Rijksmuseum, and an appendix on printing plates surviving after Rembrandt's death are also included.