Rembrandt: Thinking on Paper
For the British Museum’s touring exhibition Rembrandt: Thinking on Paper, we created two short museum exhibition films exploring Rembrandt’s creative process and his extraordinary works on paper.
The conservation film looks closely at the physical materials behind Rembrandt’s drawings. Working alongside the British Museum’s conservators and the Hirox microscope team, we combined specialist optics with macro cinematography to capture the fibres, textures and marks hidden within the paper, from charcoal splinters and black chalk particles to reed pen strokes, watermarks and corrections.
The curatorial film introduces Rembrandt, seventeenth-century Amsterdam and his experimental approach to printmaking. Unlike many of his paintings, these works on paper were often not made to fulfil a commission, giving Rembrandt greater freedom to test ideas, revisit subjects and work for his own interest. Seen together, they offer a remarkably direct glimpse into his creative process, almost as if we are watching him think.
One of the great pleasures of making films like these is the feeling that, by the end of the process, you have somehow come to know the artist a little better. After spending so much time with Rembrandt’s ideas, materials and marks, we came away feeling unexpectedly close to him, not just to the famous artist, but to the person thinking, experimenting and working behind the images.
