19th-century heliogravure print donated to Ripon’s art collection

A 19th-century heliogravure print has been donated to Ripon College by Alan Leonard ’86 and his wife, Brenda, of Cape May, New Jersey. The print is made after Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Presentation in the Temple in the Dark Manner,” c.1654. It is now hanging in the Resource Center of C.J. Rodman Center for the Arts.

The print is made from a plate of Rembrandt’s work, which Leonard believes was an original from Rembrandt’s studio.

“I inherited the print from my grandparents, Ludwig and Antonia Bendix,” he says. “They probably purchased the print in the 1930s.”

Héliogravure is the oldest procedure for reproducing photographic images and is considered an artistic medium in its own right. In a complex and meticulous photochemical process, a photographic image is fixed and etched on a copper plate and the plate is then hand-turned to produce the print. The resulting highly detailed images have the continuous tones of a photograph.