Rembrandt van Rijn, the greatest painter of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ and one of a handful of artists known universally by his first name, returns to the Academy Galleries during the Festival of the Arts in response to popular demand.

Rembrandt painted 330 works that have been scattered throughout galleries and collections across the globe in the centuries since and now hang in 18 countries (with 52 works inaccessible to the public for various reasons).

A research project to identify and record every work by Rembrandt began in 1968 (and has continued, with two previously unrecorded paintings being verified as by Rembrandt only recently). The project to use modern reproduction technology and techniques to digitally recreate the original works as they were when they first left the artist’s studio arose from this research and has been done in close collaboration with the Rembrandt Research Project Foundation in Amsterdam.

The result on display in this exhibition is 57 of the greatest and most famous paintings by one of the greatest and most famous painters of all time reproduced to the size and condition that the artist originally created. They are not copies of what you might see if you viewed the original now, but reproductions of what Rembrandt would have seen and handled.