Watermark: None

Light brown foxing throughout¹¹Typical of most drawings formerly in the collection of Hofstede de Groot, which at some point during his ownership were stored in unfavourably damp conditions.

…; collection Andrew James (? - 1845), London;²²According to his will in the National Archives, London, inv. no. PROB 112200217. his daughter, Sarah Ann James (? - 1890), London;³³According to an inscription on the drawing. …; collection Sir John Charles Robinson (1824-1913), London (L. 1433), 1895;⁴⁴According to an inscription on the drawing. from whom purchased, as Rembrandt, with seven other drawings, through the mediation of the dealer Th. Agnew, by Dr Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), The Hague, 1901;⁵⁵Hofstede de Groot notes, KB. by whom donated to the museum,1906, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1930

Object number: RP-T-1930-30

Credit line: Gift of C. Hofstede de Groot, The Hague

After Christ’s Resurrection, two of his apostles met him on the road to Emmaus. During the meal they later shared, Christ blessed the bread, shared it out, and only then did they recognize him (Luke 24:28-32).

This moment of recognition has often been depicted, including by Rembrandt, who made paintings, etchings and drawings of this subject both early and late in his career, as in the painting dated 1629 in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris (inv. no. 409),⁶⁶RRP, I (1982), no. A 16 the etching dated 1634 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-159),⁷⁷B. 88; New Hollstein: Rembrandt, no. 129. the painting dated 1648 in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 1739),⁸⁸A. Bredius, Rembrandt: The Complete Edition of the Paintings (rev. edn. by H. Gerson), London 1969 (orig. edn. Vienna 1936), no. 578; RRP, V (2011), no. V 14. and the etching dated 1654 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1962-46).⁹⁹B. 87; New Hollstein: Rembrandt, no. 283. A drawing of the subject in the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA (inv. no. 1968.18),¹⁰¹⁰Benesch, no. 11. is not a ‘spontaneous’ pen drawing, but a copy or imitation, made over a sketch in black chalk. Another problematic drawing, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. no. 2139),¹¹¹¹Benesch, no. C 47. which depicts Christ Vanishing at the Supper at Emmaus and which was reproduced in facsimile by Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798) and Christiaan Josi (1768-1828), is considered by some to be a copy or a pupil’s drawing and by others to be an authentic work by Rembrandt from circa 1640-41.¹²¹²J.R. Judson, E. Haverkamp-Begemann and A.M. Logan, Rembrandt after Three Hundred Years: An Exhibition of Rembrandt and his Followers, exh. cat. Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago) and elsewhere 1969-70, no. 122; D. Scrase, The Golden Century: Dutch Master Drawings from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, exh. cat. Munich (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus) and elsewhere 1995-96, no. 106.

Representations of this scene from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are mainly based on a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) of the same subject (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-1352)¹³¹³B. 48. or on Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper. In 1635 Rembrandt made two signed copies of the latter, one in pen and ink now in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 3769),¹⁴¹⁴Benesch, no. 445; H. Bevers, Rembrandt: Die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, kritischer Katalog, coll. cat. Ostfildern/Berlin 2006, no. 7. and the other in red chalk in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. 1975.1.794).¹⁵¹⁵Benesch, no. 443; E. Haverkamp-Begemann (ed.), The Robert Lehman Collection, VII: Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-century European Drawings: Central Europe, the Netherlands, France, England, coll. cat. New York 1999, no. 66. In Rembrandt’s copies after Leonardo, Christ is seated behind a table, seen straight on, flanked by figures seated in different poses to the left and right. In his early painting in the Musée Jacquemart-André, however, and in his etching of 1634, Rembrandt departed from the traditional composition: Christ is not seated in the middle but to the right of the table. By the time of his later representations, he had returned to the symmetrical composition. A copy after Leonardo’s Last Supper in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 1369),¹⁶¹⁶H. Bevers, with a contribution by G.J. Dietz and A. Penz, Zeichnungen der Rembrandtschule im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, coll. cat. Berlin 2018, no. 85. was recently attributed by Bevers to Rembrandt pupil Arent de Gelder (1645-1727).

Some authors consider the present drawing to be a study for the etching of 1654, but the only similar figure is that of Christ with his arms outstretched. The innkeeper standing behind the table seems, according to Stechow and Henkel, to have been borrowed from a painted composition by Titian in the Louvre (inv. no. 746), which may have become more widely known through a reproductive print of 1656 by François Chauveau (1613-1676) (e.g. London, British Museum, inv. no. 1898,0215.16).¹⁷¹⁷Inventaire du fonds français, XVIIe, II, Paris 1951, no. 43. In the Chauveau print, the innkeeper looks down to his right, at the seated figure to Christ’s right, and if this print – whose date Henkel incorrectly cited as 1654 – was one of the models for the drawing, it was made two years after the etching and cannot be seen as a study for it. The museum’s drawing has a messy appearance, and the handling of form is awkward: the figure of Christ has some allure, but the man seated to his right seems deformed, with excessively high shoulders. Rembrandt would never have made a drawing like this: he always convincingly suggested the forms even if he did not precisely render them.

The authenticity of the drawing has long been questioned,¹⁸¹⁸W. von Seidlitz, ‘Die Sammlung der Rembrandt-Zeichnungen von Dr. C. Hofstede de Groot im Haag’, Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst n.s. 28 (1917), p. 253. See Benesch, no. A 66, for arguments against an attribution to Rembrandt. with most scholars assuming that it was made by someone other than Rembrandt after rather than before the etching of 1654. The same paper and ink were used for the View of the Amstelveensewg outside Amsterdam (inv. no. RP-T-1961-85), which is generally dated circa 1660-62. The Supper at Emmaus may have been made in the same period by a pupil using the same material.¹⁹¹⁹O. Hirschmann, ‘Die Handzeichnungen-Sammlung Dr. C. Hofstede de Groot im Haag’, Der Cicerone 8 (1916), pp. 400-10, already pointed out the problem of the discrepancy of a date of 1654 versus a technique and material of 1660.

Peter Schatborn, 2018

C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1276 (as Rembrandt, c. 1660); W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, II, no. 529 (as Rembrandt, c. 1661); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, no. 70 (as Rembrandt, 1659-60); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. A 66; P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1985, no. 87, with earlier literature

P. Schatborn, 2018, 'school of Rembrandt van Rijn, Supper at Emmaus, Amsterdam, c. 1660', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200118038