Significant art turns into overall body art as guests to Amsterdam’s Rembrandt Household Museum get inked

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Henk Schiffmaker’s needle whirrs as he tattoos the acquainted lines of an elephant on Lilian Rachmaran’s back.

“Highbrow to lowbrow” is how the famed Dutch tattoo artist describes his most up-to-date challenge — inking sketches by Rembrandt van Rijn on to the skin of visitors to the making the Golden Age learn after called home.

Or call it superior art to physique artwork.

The Rembrandt House Museum has remodeled a single of its rooms into a tattoo parlor for a residency it phone calls “A Very poor Man’s Rembrandt,” showcasing Schiffmaker and other major Amsterdam tattoo artists for a 7 days starting off Monday.

For in between about 50 euros and 250 euros ($54 – $270), guests can get their own long lasting reminder of Rembrandt.

“It’s a juxtaposition — a bounce from substantial to small, from intellectual to lowbrow,” Schiffmacher explained to The Connected Press. “And it is wonderful that these two worlds can stop by a person another. Truly it’s definitely just one world due to the fact it is about artwork.”

Museum Director Milou Halbesma claimed the celebration is a way of attracting new site visitors to the historic property and having men and women nearer to the artist.

“I consider it is a really good up to date way to have your possess Rembrandt,” she mentioned.

The workshop has already proved a hit. All appointments accessible on the net have been stuffed within just 10 minutes, she said, nevertheless there are still some slots accessible for individuals who walk into the museum and wait around their transform.

Schiffmacher and his colleagues have tailored some of Rembrandt’s sketches to make them suitable for tattooing — producing traces thinner so they don’t expand jointly as the tattoo ages.

They see similarities amongst their function and the artist’s speedy sketches — but there is a person key big difference.

“The canvas is diverse,” Schiffmacher said. “The canvas can speak to you, transfer also a lot, float, even faint. That did not materialize for Rembrandt.”

Rachmaran, who operates at the museum, was the 1st human being in Schiffmacher’s chair.

She bought his variation of a person of Rembrandt’s popular sketches of an Asian elephant thought to be Hansken, which first arrived in Amsterdam in 1633 on a ship from Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — as a reward for the Prince of Orange.

“I adore the animals, they are so religious and intelligent and impressing and Rembrandt also designed Hansken, the initially elephant in Europe,” she explained.

Obtaining a function by Schiffmacher in concerning her other tattoos was also portion of the attraction Monday.

“I’m quite honored to have a single produced by Henk himself,” she reported.