3-021-324 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Rembrandt's hundred-guilder piece, "Christ Healing the Sick", 1869. 'This most famous of all etchings has acquired yet increased interest from the sale twice within the last two years of a single impression for upwards of one thousand pounds. To your true "collector," the question of rarity is put before all others...The "first states" - that is, the few and consequently rare impressions taken by the etcher to test his work, will invariably fetch far higher prices than prints taken after he has corrected and completed the plate...The immense value of [this etching] arises from the fact that only eight examples of the first state of the plate are known to exist...the eighth impression, which we have engraved, was sold last year on the death of its possessor, Mr. Samuel Palmer...the title of the print, "The Hundred-Guilder Piece," this having originally acquired that title from the circumstance of an impression having once realised a hundred guilders (about £10) - a sum then considered enormous. Of Rembrandt's matchless power as an etcher - of the marvellous beauties of this particular plate, especially the exquisitely delicate, yet most graphically characteristic, rendering of the heads, we have not space, even were it needful, to speak'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.