From opening-day art fair sales reports to auction results, today’s art market coverage is awash in eye-popping prices for works of all kinds. Yet seldom in art history have these numbers ever supplanted the actual titles of the pieces themselves. (Can you imagine referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi as Leonardo’s $450 Million?) This, however, is precisely the case for Rembrandt’s so-called 100 Guilder Print (ca. 1649), one of the earliest known works effectively named after its reputed price tag.
Although the print is a masterpiece of storytelling that collages together the events from several verses in the Gospel of St. Matthew—most notably of Christ healing the sick—it is better remembered for the surrounding lore. Its storied place in art history has prompted numerous exhibitions, technical studies, and even its central role in a performance by the late Viennese Actionist artist Hermann Nitsch. Read on to find out the backstory behind the de facto title, how the Dutch master controlled the supply and demand for his prints, and why a botched “restoration” has colored the work’s afterlife for the past 150 years.
What Were 100 Guilders worth?
It’s not a recent development that the work is referred to the way it is. Auction catalogues in Rembrandt’s own time repeatedly listed the etching as The 100 Guilder Print rather than by any reference to its subject matter. (It did not become widespread for Western artists to title their works until the 19th century.)
But how much could 100 guilders buy in the mid-17th century? At that time, the amount would have translated to one-third of the annual salary of an outdoor laborer, or one-fifth that of a pastor. Alternatively, according to calculations made by the scholar Anne Goldgar in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), 100 guilders would also have been enough to purchase 2,535 pounds of rye bread and 570 pounds of meat—a substantial haul for the price of any artwork, let alone a print.
Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Il Morbetto (The Plague) (c. 1512-1513). Photo: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
Rembrandt’s early biographer Filippo Baldinucci noted in 1686 (possibly apocryphally) that the Dutch master sometimes bought back his prints for high sums at auction to boost their prices on the secondary market. All the same, according to Amy Golahny’s Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print (2021), the work likely never met the fabled price during Rembrandt’s lifetime. In 1654, the Antwerp-based print dealer Joannes Meyssens claimed that “it should only cost 30 guilders.” Similarly, an inscription on the verso of one of the impressions notes that the print had cost 48 guilders.
As for Rembrandt, he apparently exchanged an impression of The 100 Guilder Print for Il Morbetto (ca. 1512-13), the Italian nickname for an engraving after Raphael by Marcantonio Raimondi. The print depicts a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid and is about half the size of Rembrandt’s etching—yet for the Dutch master, the smaller print was worth the trade.
Impressions of Demand: From Multiple States to Japanese Papers
From a technical standpoint, The 100 Guilder Print was a tour de force of printmaking for its skillful combination of etching and drypoint. To control the demand for his editions, Rembrandt also often made different “states,” a printmaking term indicating that modifications were made from one impression to another. For instance, there are two states for The 100 Guilder Print; the second state includes additional shading to the donkey, camel, and archway in the background—minor variations that nonetheless could have tempted true connoisseurs to acquire both states.
Workers separate paper for drying at a mill that produces handmade paper at Iwano Heizaburo Seishi Sho Company in Echizen paper village in Fukui, Japan. Photo: Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images.
Rembrandt also heightened the print’s scarcity by printing it on different types of paper. “Rembrandt’s Etchings & Japanese Echizen Paper,” a 2015 exhibition at the Rembrandt House Museum, examined the artist’s use of paper from the region of Echizen in Fukui Prefecture, one of Japan’s oldest areas for paper production. Echizen papers are made with the fiber of the gampi plant, a shrub native to the country that gives the final product a more luminous quality than the era’s typical European paper, which was based in linen fiber.
Gampi papers were brought to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company in the 1640s, and some early impressions of The 100 Guilder Print utilized them soon afterward. This makes Rembrandt one of the first Western artists known to have used Japanese paper in their work.
The Complicated Afterlife of The 100 Guilder Print
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, The Pharisees Debating (Fragment from the Hundred Guilder Print), (ca. 1649). Getty Images.
What has happened to the etching since Rembrandt’s death reveals the enduring, and ultimately destructive, fascination with his masterpiece. Impressions of The 100 Guilder Print continued to be issued after he died in 1669. This practice was not necessarily uncommon in the print trade: dealers and presses have since issued posthumous editions for other celebrated artists, such as Francisco Goya, Camille Pissaro, and Andy Warhol.
However, in 1775, the British army officer and amateur artist Captain William Baillie acquired Rembrandt’s original copper plate for The 100 Guilder Print. Baillie initially sought to “restore” it by engraving on the plate himself, irrevocably altering the master’s handiwork. (For a more extreme example of restoration gone wrong, see “Beast Jesus.”)
Baillie then went on to chop the reworked (some might say vandalized) copper plate into four pieces and print them individually, resulting in a series of diminished 18th-century versions of The 100 Guilder Print. Going further, Baillie even made his own original etching after portions of the print, resulting in crude impressions far removed from Rembrandt’s sensitive mastery.
Rembrandt, Christ Preaching and Healing (Fragment from the Hundred Guilder Print, Reworked by William Baillie), ca. 1649. Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images.
Given that its purported original price has defined The 100 Guilder Print for centuries, some readers may be wondering about its present-day value. According to the Artnet Price Database, the most expensive edition of the work sold at Sotheby’s New York for $325,000 in 2007. In more recent years, editions of the print’s second state have fluctuated between $60,000 and $70,000 each under the hammer. Captain Baillie’s reworked prints have brought in lower prices; buyers paid $38,000 for one edition in 2013 (more than triple its high estimate) at Sotheby’s London and $25,000 for another in 2019 at Christie’s New York. Bonhams will bring one to auction in New York on November 26, bearing a high estimate of $30,000.
For comparison, Golahny noted that 100 guilders would have been roughly equal to $6,000 in 2021, which would mean around $7,000 in 2024 after adjusting for inflation. In this sense, Rembrandt’s greatest print—and even Baillie’s “restored” variants of it—are trading for multiples of their namesake price. All of which verifies that Rembrandt’s aesthetic mastery has aged far better than any ink-on-paper impression ever could.