--- title: 35 Rembrandt Etchings Bought for a Few Guilders Kept in an Old Drawer description: Charlotte Meyer's grandfather paid a few guilders for 35 prints around 1900. Rembrandt House experts confirmed they are genuine Rembrandt etchings. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-03T09:44:31.830Z updated: 2026-11-03T09:48:58.184Z canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/rembrandt-etchings-old-drawer-zutphen image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-34878808.webp categories: Culture & Society, Good News content_type: Feature region: Netherlands publication: Rich Woman Magazine about: - type: Person name: Charlotte Meyer description: Charlotte Meyer is a collector from Zutphen in the Netherlands who inherited 35 Rembrandt etchings from her grandfather and has built a collection of around 70 etchings by Rembrandt and his circle. jobTitle: Collector --- Between 1900 and 1920, a Dutch print lover bought 35 different etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn for a few guilders. Nobody around him thought much of them. 'Nobody was interested in etchings back then,' his granddaughter, Charlotte Meyer, told the regional broadcaster Omroep Gelderland. Her grandmother paid the prints no attention, and the family kept them without expecting anything. A century later, those same sheets were hanging in a museum, and the head of collections at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam was saying he had never seen so many in one place. ## A Folder of Prints in a Zutphen Home When her grandfather died, the folder passed down to Meyer, who lives in Zutphen, a Hanseatic town on the river IJssel in the eastern province of Gelderland. For years she assumed it held nothing more than attractive old pictures and left it closed in an old drawer among the family keepsakes. In 2020, during the pandemic and just after moving house, she opened it again. Inside were small sheets, some measuring only 10 by 5 centimetres. Among them were Rembrandt's Self-Portrait in a Fur Cap, etched in 1630 when he was about 24 and still working in Leiden, and The Pancake Woman of 1635, in which an old woman fries pancakes while children crowd around her pan. The longer Meyer looked, the more she suspected the prints were more than decoration. ## Rembrandt House Museum Experts in Zutphen Meyer contacted the museum world, half expecting to be politely dismissed. She said later that she sensed the specialists had her down as one more hopeful owner convinced she had found a real Rembrandt. Epco Runia, head of collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, has admitted he thought the same. He told NH Radio that he assumed it would come to nothing, as the museum hears from hopeful owners very often and most of what they bring in turns out to be a reproduction or a later version. The mood changed when the specialists came to Meyer's home and went through the folder sheet by sheet. 'Charlotte, you have no idea what you are holding,' they told her, as she recalled to Omroep Gelderland. All 35 were confirmed as etchings by Rembrandt, and a century in a closed folder, away from light, had kept them in excellent condition. ## How Rembrandt Etchings Were Made and Sold Rembrandt (1606 to 1669) is best known for his paintings, but he was also one of the most inventive printmakers Europe has produced. To make an etching, he drew with a needle through a waxy, acid-resistant coating on a copper plate. Acid then bit into the exposed lines, and the inked plate went through a press. One plate could print many sheets, and Rembrandt often went back to his plates to add or remove lines, so the same image can survive in several distinct versions. That is why a find like this differs from the discovery of a lost painting. Runia explained that Rembrandt made around 300 different etchings, printed in runs, and that the Rembrandt House holds almost all of them. The museum already knew every image in Meyer's folder. What struck him was the number gathered in one family collection. 'Having so many together is unique. I have never experienced that before,' he said. There is an irony in the price her grandfather paid. Rembrandt's etching of Christ healing the sick, made around 1648, earned the nickname the Hundred Guilder Print from the high sum it was said to fetch in his own day. Two and a half centuries later, a few guilders bought 35 of his sheets. ## What 35 Rembrandt Etchings Are Worth Meyer will not put a figure on the collection, and she has no intention of selling it. Runia estimated that each etching is worth thousands of euros. The top of the market sits far higher. In December 2025, Christie's in London sold Rembrandt's portrait of Arnout Tholinx, etched around 1656, for £3.1 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for an old master print. Christie's described it as the last impression of that great rarity still in private hands. In February 2026, Sotheby's sold his drawing Young Lion Resting for $17.9 million. Meyer's etchings come from editions the experts know well, so they belong to a different tier. For any print, though, condition and the quality of the impression carry much of the price, and these sheets came out of the folder in fine shape. ## Charlotte Meyer's Growing Rembrandt Collection The discovery turned Meyer [from an heir into a collector](https://richwoman.co/article/arabella-huntington-the-woman-who-made-art-her-legacy-beyond-the-gilded-age). Since 2020 she has bought etchings from across Europe, by Rembrandt and by the artists who came before him, worked alongside him and followed him. Her collection now numbers around 70 prints. She has called it a risky business, given how many copies circulate, and said she does not fall for them any more than her grandfather did. She has also said she has become completely enchanted by Rembrandt and the mastery of his work. ## Rembrandt, From Dark to Light at Stedelijk Museum Zutphen Meyer chose her own town's museum, the Stedelijk Museum Zutphen, as the first in the Netherlands to show the collection. The exhibition Rembrandt, van donker naar licht (Rembrandt, From Dark to Light) ran from 21st March to 14th June 2026, with more than fifty of Rembrandt's etchings seen in public for the first time in a hundred years. The museum hung them alongside prints by his predecessors, contemporaries and followers, together with etchings from its own collection and from the Museum Henriette Polak. The rooms followed the course of Rembrandt's life: his early years, his years of success, his period of mourning and his final years in poverty. Scents and hands-on stations showing how etching works were added to bring visitors into seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The show had support from the Cultuurfonds, the Mondriaan Fonds and the Municipality of Zutphen. Meyer led guided tours herself on 29th March and 17th May, focusing on the symbolism in Rembrandt's etchings. When the exhibition closed, the prints went back to her home. ## Checking an Old Print at Home The story set off a small rush. Within days, Runia said, five people turned up at the Rembrandt House in a single day with prints of their own, far more than usual. Every one of them was a fake. If you have an old print tucked away in a family folder, the most useful step is the one Meyer took: ask a museum print room or [a specialist at an established auction house](https://richwoman.co/article/attic-treasure-to-trophy-asset-what-the-9-12m-superman-no-1-sale-teaches-collectors-and-execu) to look at the sheet in person. Rembrandt's etchings have been copied by hand, reprinted from his worn plates long after his death and reproduced photographically for well over a century. A photograph or a description over the phone cannot settle the question, and only someone with the paper in hand can tell an impression from Rembrandt's lifetime from a later one. Meyer's grandfather bought prints he liked, at a price that suited him, and kept them together. That choice is the reason 35 Rembrandt etchings [survived a century together](https://richwoman.co/article/shakespeare-s-first-folio-found-in-saint-omer), in excellent condition, in a family home in Zutphen.