Moodiness is on the menu.

You’ve seen the tattered blue banner, but have you ever ventured to Schermerhorn’s own Wallach Art Gallery? Fresh off the success of last year’s Romare Bearden exhibition, the gallery now plays host to an impressive selection of etchings and engravings by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rinj. Amsterdam Bureau Chief Henry Litwhiler investigates.

Few media lend themselves to analysis of the meandering path an artist takes to arrive at a mystical “finished product.” Where can we find the abortive beard of a clean-shaven sculpture? What becomes of an empty field after its painter decides to dot it with sheep? Even the sketches that give birth to works are more blueprint than unfinished building; they can reveal intention, but the genealogical leap between plan and product can be fuzzy.

Etching and engraving, however, allow an artist to create unlimited prints from a single plate, and even to create prints at various times during the plate’s life. This process can provide a window into the evolution of a single plate and, in turn, of an artist’s vision.

In the case of an artist as famous and well-regarded as Rembrandt van Rijn, such series of progressive prints from the same copperplate have a tendency to be scattered to far-flung museums and private collections. Curators and collectors alike rightly regard individual prints as worthwhile even without their siblings. But there is no denying the aesthetic power of seeing a work alongside what might be called its once and future selves.

Columbia Art History PhD Candidate Robert Fucci evidently agrees. As curator of Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions at The Wallach Art Gallery, Fucci has brought together 52 prints from 18 series in a grand chronology spanning 26 years of Rembrandt’s career. To do so, he coordinated with a plethora of cultural organizations, non-profits, and galleries from Dartmouth to Harvard to the Library of Congress.

The result is as impressive as the undertaking. Visitors are struck first by the obvious coherence of the exhibit: the works are intuitively ordered and grouped, and the gallery itself exudes professionalism and an exacting attention to detail. Portraits, religious and mythological scenes, and even a pair of landscapes form an even, chronological line from the entrance and back again. The lighting is calm, not sterile, and even minutiae like the design of the pamphlets suggest tremendous care.

Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: “The Three Crosses,” 1653

But there is another, almost discordant strand at work in Changing Impressions. For amidst the careful ordering and placement, there is the element of hodgepodge inherent in an exhibit that includes pieces of such disparate provenances. The impressions in the “The Three Crosses” series (above), like those in nearly every other series on display, have frames of different dimensions and mats of different colors. But though this variety of presentation is more noticeable than it would be in an exhibit of pieces that were themselves more varied, the effect is to remind, not distract. These children were separated at birth and now wear different clothes, but their shared parentage overpowers all else.

This gentle but insistent reminder emphasizes, among other things, the very aspect of Rembrandt’s genius that printmaking most facilitated: the manipulation of light. With engraving, Rembrandt and his assistants could selectively wipe copperplates after inking them, thereby creating areas of darkness and light independent of actual grooves in the metal. The most noticeable differences in many series on display in Changing Impressions come not from modifications to the printing plate itself but from tweaks to the ink-wiping.

The Adoration of the Shepherds: A Night Piece, state VIII, c. 1657

Nowhere in Changing Impressions does Rembrandt take this technique to such an extreme as in the aptly-subtitled “The Adoration of the Shepherds: A Night Piece” (above). Less central figures recede almost completely into the darkness, but they lack none of the detail and precision of even the illuminating lamp itself. It is this remarkable effect—darkness without dullness—that most contributes to the uncanny evocative power of the exhibit’s individual pieces. And it is the occasional illumination of these areas of sharp darkness, as in the contrast between states III and IV of “The Three Crosses” (above), that the viewer sees beyond the shadow of a doubt that Rembrandt has fleshed out a world even where he has obscured it.

Does such insight come at a cost? Time and mental energy, perhaps. Perusing the exhibit sometimes feels like playing a highbrow spot-the-difference game. But the gratification is nearly instant, the aesthetic reward far greater than the strain of jumping between two adjacent images, and the atmosphere so subdued as to preclude stress. Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions repays sustained attention, but it does not demand it.

This exhibit is one of the Wallach Art Gallery’s most impressive and also one of the last it will host in its current, rather cramped home on Schermerhorn 8 before its planned 2016 move to the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. Changing Impressions is a good physical fit for the gallery’s current space, but the exhibition’s curatorial ambition demands something more conspicuous than a fraction of a floor and a weathered banner (cf. any of Columbia’s peer institutions).

In the mean time, this is not an exhibition to miss. A thorough walkthrough takes less than an hour, and the gallery’s location couldn’t be more convenient. The exhibit will close on December 12th. The gallery will also be hosting a free symposium on Thursday, November 5th, which will feature leading Rembrandt scholars from the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands.