The Blindness of Tobit: The Large Plate (1651): Art, History and Details

The Blindness of Tobit: The Large Plate (1651) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Having sent Tobias to collect a debt, a blind Tobit knocks over his wife’s spinning wheel and gropes for the door in his excitement to see his long-absent son. Rembrandt selectively inked and wiped the plate of this beautiful impression to enhance the scene’s meaning. The dark ink left behind the figure accentuates Tobit’s isolation and makes his beard-the only area of the print without any ink-seem even brighter, dramatizing the father’s anguished expression. Tobit’s shadow is cast by the firelight onto the wall to the far left of the doorway, symbolizing how far he has strayed from his goal and the poignancy of his condition.

Object facts

• Title: The Blindness of Tobit: The Large Plate
• Date: 1651
• Creator attribution: Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)
• Culture: Netherlands
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching and drypoint
• Dimensions: Sheet: 16.3 x 13.2 cm (6 7/16 x 5 3/16 in.); Platemark: 15.8 x 12.9 cm (6 1/4 x 5 1/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2002.10

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Franklin, David. The Cleveland Museum of Art. London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd., 2012.
• Watkins, Catherine Bailey. Rembrandt's 1654 Life of Christ Prints: Experimentation, Tradition, and the Question of Series. 2011.
• Monney, Gilles, Camille Noverraz, and Vincent Barras. Pierre Decker: médecin et collectionneur. Lausanne : Éditions BHMS, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.