Visitors to the Rembrandt House Museum will soon be able to leave with an indelible souvenir of the Dutch painter. Photo: AFP
In Amsterdam, the Rembrandt House Museum is innovating in celebration of the Dutch Golden Age master who lived there for nearly two decades. In fact, the famous house-museum, which reopened in April, is set to host a pop-up tattoo parlour, providing visitors with an enduring souvenir.
From June 19 to 25, visitors to the Rembrandt House Museum (Museum Rembrandthuis) will have the opportunity to get a tattoo of a selection of works by the Dutch painter.
Among them are etchings and sketches of various figures, as well as a self-portrait of Rembrandt or his signature, for example.
The tattoos will be realised by four artists from the Schiffmacher & Veldhoen studio, including Henk Schiffmacher. This famous Dutch tattoo artist and photographer, who has been adorning bodies with ink since the 1970s, has notably had his work on display at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, in 2014, as part of the Tatoueurs, tatoues exhibition.
This initiative goes by the name of The Poor Man’s Rembrandt Project.
In a statement, Henk Schiffmacher explains: "Worldwide, more tattoos are sold than works of art to hang on your wall. An old tattoo artist once called tattoos ‘The Poor Man’s Rembrandt’: a work of art that is more affordable than a painting by one of the old masters, but no less carefully executed and selected."
Moreover, etchings form a major part of the work of the Dutch master, who realised more than 300 of them during his lifetime. And this discipline is not unlike tattooing in its precision and meticulousness.
The Rembrandt House Museum has announced that all the slots to have a work by its famous historical inhabitant etched on the skin have already sold out online. Still, some non-bookable slots have been set aside for art lovers willing to take a chance. They will have to pay between €110 (RM543) and €250 (RM1,234) to leave with an indelible souvenir of the Dutch painter.
A meagre sum considering that the auction record for a painting by Rembrandt stands at some €22.3mil (RM110mil). This was achieved by Portrait Of A Man With Arms Akimbo, a painting dating from 1658, sold at Christie's in London in 2009. - AFP
