A young man in Amsterdam will become the lifelong owner of a free Rembrandt etching, thanks to a partnership between the Rembrandt House Museum and two Dutch tattoo studios.
In a collaboration entitled “The Poor Man’s Rembrandt Project”, tattoo artists are recreating one of Rembrandt’s most intricate etchings, The Descent from the Cross (1633), across a man’s entire back. The artwork will take 20 hours to create by a team of tattoo artists from the studios Schiffmacher & Veldhoen in Amsterdam and St. Catherina in Antwerp.
Members of the public can also book a session or drop in to the museum between 26 October-7 November to get a (smaller) Rembrandt tattoo, costing from €100 to €300, from the museum's temporary studio.
This is the second edition of the project; tattoo artists from Schiffmacher & Veldhoen first offered tattoos inspired by the Dutch master’s works in a pop-up studio at the museum in 2023.
The project is not a gimmick, according to the Rembrandt House Museum's director Milou Halbesma. “This is all about content,” she tells The Art Newspaper. “We are a museum of craftsmanship, and we are trying to throw open the craft of Rembrandt and his students as widely as possible. If you translate that to today, we have a number of world-famous Amsterdam creators… And this is a chance to get a tattoo from one of these masters.”
Some of the Rembrandt-inspired tattoo designs that visitors can request at the pop-up studio Courtesy of Museum Rembrandthuis
The tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher says that the etching—one of a series by Rembrandt focusing on the people taking Christ’s body from the cross—was particularly suitable. “We looked at other Rembrandts but this was so dramatic,” he says. “The spine almost becomes part of the cross.”
He adds that a tattoo-based interpretation of the 17th-century Dutch master is also fitting. “Rembrandt was interested in sea farers, he was a collector, and there were so many different people in Amsterdam at the time, there would have been tattooed sailors,” he says.
Bo Kwakernaak, 28, and from Amersvoort, responded to a call on Instagram to provide his body as the canvas for the The Descent from the Cross tattoo. He currently has a partial reproduction of the etching on his back, created in around ten hours, and it will be completed during a late night opening at the museum on 7 November.
“I have always felt a connection with Rembrandt paintings,” he tells The Art Newspaper. “I’m not religious, but I’ve always been drawn to religious imagery. Here, it is the emotion in the faces, the feeling of grief. There is a whole story in one image.”
When the tattoo is completed, according to Schiffmacher, the pigment needs to ‘soften’ into the skin for a year before it will look its best. “This is an etching too but the skin is different from paper,” he says. “It is the only bit of art you can take to your grave.”
