However, a crucial aspect of Rembrandt’s development was his intense study of people, objects, and their surroundings “from life.”

Curator Nadine M. Orenstein details the great admiration Rembrandt had for the work of Hercules Segers and highlights some of the etchings he produced using Segers's own printing plate.

Rembrandt was fascinated with subjects from the Old and New Testaments and, enjoyed revealing the realistic human emotion and narrative detail inspired by these stories.

The Unseen Rembrandt attempts to achieve a greater understanding of Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and prints in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection by showcasing details if the works displaying Rembrandt's distinct brush, pen, and point movement. This unique examination reveals a detailed quality of his painting that is otherwise impossible to see under ordinary museum gallery conditions.

Rembrandt was one of the few Dutch artists of the seventeenth century to depict scenes from the Bible. While his contemporaries painted city views, landscapes, portraits, and opulent still lifes—then the fashionable subjects—Rembrandt deviated from his countrymen and produced a breathtaking series of paintings, drawings, and etchings of Biblical events. In these works he was more concerned with the people in the Bible and their relationships with one another than with their actions as such. As A. Hyatt Mayor remarks, "Rembrandt avoided the horizon-wide spectacles that would make poor bedtime stories, such as the Gathering of Manna, the Massacre of the Innocents, or the Last Judgment." Instead, he portrayed with unique intimacy those scenes that tended to explore the human condition. He was drawn to situations in which ordinary persons are transformed through contact with the divine presence, and returned time and again to the apocryphal Book of Tobit and to episodes in the life of Christ. With the exception of a few drawings and two paintings, the illustrations in this book are etchings. The etchings are among Rembrandt's best-known and best-loved works; indeed, as Mr. Mayor points out, they, "unlike the paintings, were treasured at the very beginning!" Most of the illustrations shown here are from the Metropolitan Museum's collection. Notable among them are two large prints—Christ Presented to the People and The Three Crosses—on which Rembrandt made radical changes. The progressive states of these two etchings provide by themselves a fascinating study of the artist's creative process.

Rembrandt—the mere mention of his art nowadays raises the issue of authenticity. As famous paintings have been withdrawn from the canon of his autograph work, journalists have played up the sensational news with stories of fakes or lost monetary value. The public, for which the very name Rembrandt has been synonymous with the word masterpiece, may well be perplexed about the processes by which the master's authorship can be established. The purpose of the present exhibition is to demystify the kind of research that goes on at a museum like the Metropolitan by demonstrating the different approaches that art historians and art conservators take in reaching their conclusions. The Metropolitan Museum possesses one of the most significant groups of paintings, drawings, and etchings by the master, his pupils, and imitators—about eighteen paintings ascribed by common consent to Rembrandt, and about twenty-five that were once thought to be by him but are now recognized as works by pupils, followers, or, in a few cases, later imitators, as well as a large number of authentic drawings and etchings along with some problematic examples in these media. We have, therefore, limited the exhibition to the Museum's holdings. This has permitted us to focus more closely upon the works presented than would have been possible with loans from other museums.

"The density of lines enhances the extraordinary emotion of the moment."

"For me a great work of art is something that goes beyond the image that it’s depicting."