States: how a plate changes

Every time a plate is altered, impressions pulled after the alteration differ from those pulled before. Cataloguers call each distinguishable stage a state, and number them: state I, state II, and so on.

It sounds tidy. It is not.

Who decides what counts as a change

The artist does not declare states. A cataloguer studying a body of impressions notices that some have a line that others lack, groups them, and publishes the division. A later cataloguer with access to more impressions, better images or a sharper eye may notice a change the first one missed — and the state count goes up.

This is why the number of states for a plate is a property of the catalogue you are reading, not of the plate.

A worked example: this print

The plate at the centre of this project is a good illustration, because the catalogues disagree about it more than usual.

• Bartsch, 1797, recognises one state.
• Hollstein, the original series, recognises one.
• White & Boon, 1969, recognises one — the National Gallery of Art's record puts it flatly: “White/Boon 1969, no. 20, State only.”
• The New Hollstein volumes by Hinterding and Rutgers recognise four. The British Museum cites impressions as 170.II and 170.IV; the Rijksmuseum encodes its three impressions as 170-1(4), 170-2(4) and 170-4(4).
• And the National Gallery of Art's own bibliography cites the New Hollstein as “no. 170, state ii/iii” — a three-state reading of the same catalogue that two other institutions read as four.

So a description reading “state III of IV” is meaningful in exactly one of those frameworks, and unintelligible in three of them. A record that says “state III” without naming the catalogue has not told you anything checkable.

What distinguishes the states here

The catalogue's own descriptions are short and very specific. State I: the jaw under the left ear is not defined by a clear contour. State II: it is clearly delineated, and a few lines are added to the shadow of the nose. State III: the plate is probably rebitten, with cross-hatching added at the base of the feather and along the brim of the cap, the curved lines of the forehead carried over the brim, strong horizontal shading on the right ear — and the catalogue ends that description with three words, not by Rembrandt. State IV: the signature clumsily redrawn, in an edition published in Paris around 1810.

Notice what that sequence tells you. The signature is in the plate from the first state and gone by the third; the fourth exists because somebody re-cut it. States III and IV are both posthumous reworkings, which means that for this plate the state division is not four stages of an artist's thinking. It is two stages of Rembrandt's work followed by two of the print trade's.

The lesson for reading any print record

When you see a state cited, ask three questions. Which catalogue? What physically distinguishes that state from its neighbours? And did the person writing the record check, or copy it from the person before them?