De Nachtwacht c. 1790 - 1840

This is an unfinished copper plate made by Lambertus Antonius Claessens, a printmaker active around the turn of the 19th century. It is an etched copy of Rembrandt’s famous painting The Night Watch. The etching process begins with a polished copper plate covered in wax. The artist scratches an image into the wax, exposing the metal. The plate is then submerged in acid, which bites into the exposed lines. What's remarkable here is the incompleteness of the etching: you can see that the background is barely articulated, while the figures in the foreground have been developed with more detail. It gives you a privileged insight into the printmaker's labor, and how a composition emerges through laborious work on the matrix of the printing plate. This contrasts with the traditional appreciation of a 'finished' print, where the steps to production are concealed. What we see in this copper plate is the work involved in image making, and the transformation of a painting into a series of reproducible marks.