Cleveland Museum of Art

The Blindness of Tobit: The Large Plate

Rembrandt van RijnLinkedCulture matchlcp-adad34d778fc

Date: 1651
Medium: etching and drypoint
Culture: Netherlands
Department: Prints
Institution: Cleveland Museum of Art
Object ID: 162193

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

Having sent Tobias to collect a debt, a blind Tobit knocks over his wife’s spinning wheel and gropes for the door in his excitement to see his long-absent son. Rembrandt selectively inked and wiped the plate of this beautiful impression to enhance the scene’s meaning. The dark ink left behind the figure accentuates Tobit’s isolation and makes his beard-the only area of the print without any ink-seem even brighter, dramatizing the father’s anguished expression. Tobit’s shadow is cast by the firelight onto the wall to the far left of the doorway, symbolizing how far he has strayed from his goal and the poignancy of his condition.

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line: Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
Provenance: Earl of Aylesford (Lugt 58); John Heywood Hawkins (Lugt 3022); Duke of Buccleuch (Lugt 402); [sale London, Christie's, 19-22 April 1887 lot 1777, bought by Danlos, Paris]; Alfred Strölin; [sale Klipstein & Kornfeld, Bern, 7 June 1961, lot #20 bought by C.G. Boerner]; Private Collection, Germany, 1961-91; Joseph Ritman, Amsterdam; [sale Artemis and Sotheby's, no. 19, New York, 1995]