The plate outlived the man

Copper plates are property. When an artist dies they are inventoried, valued and sold like anything else, and if the artist is famous they are valuable precisely because they can still be made to yield impressions.

Rembrandt's plates were dispersed after his death and continued to be printed. In Paris around 1810, an edition known as the Recueil Basan was published from a group of them; the British Museum's record for one impression of this print describes the plate rework as by François Basan and the publication as by Henri Louis Basan. The Rijksmuseum holds an impression of the same plate associated with the Basan workshop and with a later nineteenth-century printing again.

That is not a scandal. It is the normal life of a valuable plate, and it is why the fourth state of this print exists at all: the fourth state is defined by the signature having been redrawn, and the signature was redrawn because it had worn away.

What wear looks like

Every pass through the press flattens the plate slightly. The consequences are legible:

• Fine lines vanish first. Shallow, delicately bitten passages fade to grey, then to nothing.
• Drypoint burr collapses early. The ridge of metal thrown up by a drypoint needle holds ink and prints velvety black, and it survives only a few dozen impressions. Where a late impression has thin grey lines, an early one has rich darkness.
• The plate mark softens as the edges are bevelled and worn.
• Rework becomes visible. A line strengthened by a later hand rarely matches the original in character. Once you have seen a redrawn signature you cannot unsee it.

Why a late impression is still worth studying

A posthumous impression is a document of the plate's afterlife: who owned it, who reworked it, how it was marketed, what a nineteenth-century public wanted from Rembrandt. That is a real subject, and one that is generally studied less than the seventeenth century because the objects have been treated as second-rate rather than as evidence.

An impression is not less genuine for being late. It is answering a different question.