Philly Museum Present's Rembrandt's Faces of Jesus

THE INQUIRER
By Stephan Salisbury

The Supper at Emmaus (1648) by Rembrandt on loan from Louvre

PENNSYLVANIA - On an otherwise unremarkable day about a decade ago, Lloyd DeWitt found himself poking around in the storage vaults of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among the paintings packed away in the darkness was a small head of Christ painted on wood and attributed by a stream of scholars to Rembrandt's workshop, but not to the great 17th-century master himself. The panel is now one of seven similar heads of Christ, drawn from collections worldwide, that are the core of Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, which opens at the Art Museum on Wednesday for a run through Oct. 30. The show - 22 paintings, 17 drawings, and nine prints - is the first in Philadelphia to feature Rembrandt paintings, and the first Rembrandt exhibition of any kind here since 1932, when the Art Museum hosted a show of prints. Also in this exhibition: the Louvre's newly cleaned The Supper at Emmaus (1648) and The Hundred Guilder Print (c. 1649), so called because of its immense value. [link]