What is an original print?

The word people reach for when they hear that a print exists in many copies is reproduction, and it is the wrong word. A poster of a Rembrandt painting is a reproduction: someone photographed a painting and printed the photograph. An etching by Rembrandt is not a copy of anything. There is no original painting behind it. The copper plate is the thing Rembrandt made, and the impression on paper is what that plate is for.

So the question is not whether an impression is original. It is which impression you are holding.

The plate is the matrix, not the work

Rembrandt drew through a waxy ground on a copper plate with a needle, and acid bit the exposed lines into the metal. Ink was pushed into those bitten lines, the surface wiped, damp paper laid on top, and the whole thing run through a press under great pressure. The paper is forced down into the lines and lifts the ink out of them. That pressure is also why a plate leaves a visible impressed rectangle in the sheet — the plate mark.

Do it again and you get another impression. Do it four hundred times and you get four hundred, and they are not identical.

Why impressions differ

Several reasons, and each of them is a research question in its own right.

Inking. How much ink is left on the surface of the plate when it is wiped is a decision made afresh every time. A plate wiped clean prints crisp and linear; a plate left with a film of ink prints atmospheric and dark. Rembrandt exploited this deliberately, and two impressions of the same state of the same plate can look like different weather.

Paper. Different papers take ink differently. Rembrandt used European laid paper, but also Japanese paper and vellum, and the same plate on each of them gives a different object.

Wear. Copper is soft. Every pass through the press abrades the plate a little. The finest lines go first, then the shallower ones. An impression pulled early is not just cleaner than one pulled late; it contains information the late one has lost.

State. The plate itself can be altered — lines added, passages burnished away, a signature strengthened. Each alteration creates a new state, and impressions from before and after are different objects.

What this means for looking

When you look at an impression, you are looking at a moment in the life of a piece of copper. The image tells you what Rembrandt drew. Everything else — the ink, the paper, the wear, the state — tells you when in the plate's life you are standing, and that is usually the more interesting question.