Often he gave them away to friends and fellow-artists, or tossed them, when they had answered their purpose in his art life, so continuously experimental, into one of the sixty portfolios of leather recorded in the inventory of his property.
The history of _Christ Healing the Sick_, known as _The Hundred Guilder Print_, now the most prized of all the etchings, shows that he did not attach much value, either artistic or monetary, to this plate.

He did not even receive a hundred guilders (under L9) for it, but gave the etching to his friend Jan Zoomer in exchange for _The Pest_, by M.Anthony.At the Holford sale, as has already been noted, L1750 was given for the _Hundred Guilder Print_.
It is supposed that only two of the etchings were made expressly for publication--the _Descent from the Cross_, and the _Ecce Homo_; but Rembrandt may have benefited from the sale of them through the partnership that was formed in 1660 between his son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels.
[Illustration: MINERVA 1655.

The Hermitage, St.Petersburg.] In the eighteenth century certain connoisseurs had already made collections of his etchings.

Catalogues began to be published, and in 1797 Adam Bartsch, keeper of the prints in the library at Vienna, issued the well-known catalogue that bears his name in two octavo volumes.

Since Bartsch's monumental work many students of the etchings have striven to sift the authentic from the false.