Only early replica of Rembrandt’s controversial etching: 1 copy worldwide.

[Rembrandt] / Johann Georg Hertel. [Reclining Female Nude]. Augsburg: “Rembrandt. del.” “No 80.” “I.G. Hertel. exc. A:V:,” s.a. [c. 1750-68]. [16.6 x 9.1 cm the platemark, 23.3 x 17. 2cm the sheet], [1] f. etching on laid paper. Minor edge wear, remnants of mounting on verso, unidentified collector’s stamp on verso (“H” in a circle; not in Lugt).
 
 
Very rare (1 copy worldwide: Kunsthalle Bremen), separately issued, 18th-century etched copy (in reverse) of Rembrandt’s 1658 etching traditionally known as La negresse couché or Negress Lying Down and today generally called Reclining Female Nude. This print, issued in Augsburg by Johann Georg Hertel (1719-68), is the only known early copy of this Rembrandt etching (New Hollstein, no. 308, p. 296).
 
Adam Bartsch (1757-1821) assumed that Rembrandt’s model was a Black woman, but this later was called into question. Nor is it a trivial matter, dealing as it does with issues of representation & race, artists’ models, the ‘male gaze,’ the limitations of etching as a medium, etc. Elmer Kolfin reviews the literature on these matters as they relate to Reclining Female Nude in his “Rembrandt’s Africans,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., vol. 3, part 1, p. 302.
 
Johann Georg Hertel, sometimes in conjunction with his son Georg Leopold Hertel, produced several copies of Rembrandt’s etching for the use of connoisseurs who were unable to acquire the originals. On early Rembrandt copies see New Hollstein, Rembrandt Copies, 2 vols.
 
The Hertel etchings after Rembrandt are prominently labeled with a number (here “No. 80”). These numbers refer to a filing/reference system used by the Hertels and are not an indication that the prints are part of a consecutive series or removed from a larger work (the same number sometimes on different subjects).
 
 
New Hollstein locates only the Kunsthalle Bremen copy, and I have not been able to identify any others.
 
*New Hollstein, no. 308 (the Rembrandt original); New Hollstein, Rembrandt Copies, vol. II, p. 364 (the Hertel copy); Elmer Kolfin, “Rembrandt’s Africans,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., vol. 3, part 1, pp. 271-306.