The present lot offers a rare opportunity to acquire an original printing copperplate by Rembrandt, The Angel departing from the Family of Tobias, one of the artist's late religious prints. A scene from the Old Testament, this particular moment marks the final moment in the story of Tobit: after curing Tobit's blindness and favouring his son's marriage with Sarah, the Archangel Raphael reveals his celestial identity and leaves Tobit's house. To capture the fleeting nature and movement of the scene, Rembrandt only shows the soles of the feet of the Angel as he disappears out of the picture plane, at upper right, in a blaze of light. The poses of the characters describe a variety of sentiments: humility in the figure of Tobias, gratitude in the figure of Tobit, and curiosity and startled amazement in the onlookers.
The present printing plate is one of 81 original copperplates by Rembrandt to have survived to this day. The history of collecting and handing-down of these objects is well recorded over the centuries. The main open questions related to how and when the plates left Rembrandt's possession and where they were before the estate sale of Pieter de Haan in 1767. It is generally agreed that Rembrandt sold or gifted some of his plates to his friend Clement de Jonghe, print dealer in Amsterdam (see lots 100-102), before his bankruptcy sale in 1657. The first record of these surviving plates is de Jonghe's inventory of 1677, which lists 74 of them. After this date, we have reason to assume that several plates, including the present one, came into possession of an unidentified, presumably Dutch publisher, who printed them without any rework, except for the addition of two dots in one plate corner, around the late 17th- early 18th century. The next recorded moment is de Haan's auction in 1767. Most of these plates were sold en-bloc - and almost always reworked - in France by enthusiasts and publishers such as Claude Henri Watelet, and subsequently by the Parisian publishing house Basan (for an example of the Basan Recueil , see lot 104). For over a century the plates remained in France, until in 1938 the dealer Alvin-Beaumont sold 78 plates to the American attorney and connoisseur Robert Lee Humber, who was living in Paris at the time. He eventually returned to the USA with his collection and in the 1960s gave the copperplates on a long term loan to the North Carolina Museum in Raleigh. Humber's heirs decided the sell them in 1993. They finally resurfaced on the private art market and were sold through Artemis Fine Arts, London, and Robert M. Light, Santa Barbara, California.
The etching plate in this lot is accompanied by a fine impression of the third state, showing the sole addition of the two dots in the upper right corner added not long after the artist's death, but preceding any posthumous rework of the subject made by other hands, from the fourth to the ninth, final state.