Descriptif du lot
Whilst the encounter between Saints Peter and John and the lame man is part of the standard repertoire of illustrations from the Acts of the Apostles, Rembrandt has chosen not to illustrate the miracle itself. Instead he portrays the action immediately preceding it, when Peter accosts the man saying that he can neither give him silver nor gold, but can heal him in the name of Christ (Acts III: 1-10). He may well have based the figure of Peter on an etching (B. 95), now extremely rare and technically unsuccessful, which he made thirty years earlier. In the last years of the 1650's Rembrandt's interest in Biblical subjects started to wane, and the present etching is the last one he ever executed.