Rembrandt van Rijn Bookstore
Rembrandt & Caravaggio
by Taco Dibbits, Duncan Bull, Volker Manuth, Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, Margriet van Eikema Hommers and Ernst van de Wetering
2006
Rembrandt - Caravaggio highlights the two geniuses of baroque painting: Rembrandt, the pre-eminent artist of the Dutch Golden Age, and his Italian counterpart Michelangelo Merisi (also known as Il Caravaggio). Both artists are considered revolutionary innovators in Northern and Southern European art, respectively. With their origins in different painting traditions, each developed an original and striking visual language. The juxtaposition in pairs of paintings by the two artists intensifies the comparison of their work.
Although they never met - Caravaggio (1571-1610) died four years after the birth of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) - many parallels can be drawn between the two master painters and their oeuvres. This is the first publication to comprehensively compare the works of Rembrandt with those of Caravaggio. Exploring the use of contrasting colours and chiaroscuro, both artists achieved unexpected realistic detail.
Unsettling to their contemporaries, the realism of the works of Rembrandt and Caravaggio remains exceptionally compelling to this day. Both painters scrutinised humanity in their own way, amplifying the power and enigmatic qualities of major human themes, such as love, religion, sexuality and violence. Rembrandt and Caravaggio changed not only the course of painting, but also our perception of the world.
About half of the work Rembrandt did in Leiden consisted of paintings, etchings and drawings showing older people. In these works an old woman is frequently portrayed who has traditionally been held to be Rembrandt’s mother, Neeltje Willemsdr. van Zuijdtbroeck. Whether Rembrandt really depicted her or whether this is a myth which has persisted for centuries is still not clear. This book discusses the creation of this myth, which although not firmly based on facts, has been an essential part of Rembrandt’s image for centuries.
The works for which Rembrandt’s mother was the model and which are reproduced in this book give an idea of the young artist’s iconographic interests. For instance, Rembrandt depicted her as a prophetess, attentively reading a book. Sometimes she plays an active role in religious or allegorical pictures. A similar model can also be recognized in paintings by Rembrandt’s friend Jan Lievens and his first pupil Gerrit Dou. By showing the paintings of these young masters, the book examines the artistic relationships between them. It offers a unique opportunity to compare early, closely related works and to gain a clearer picture of the collaboration among these artist
Gary Schwartz & Rembrandt offers a complete and accessible introduction to Rembrandt’s life; his work as an artist; his place in the Dutch 17th century, European civilization and present-day culture.
This books helps the reader to understand Rembrandt’s art in all its richness and complexity in small, readily comprehensible stages. Instead of the conventional divisions into life and art; painting, etching and drawing; early, middle and late periods, the book offers integrated presentations of the main themes that preoccupied Rembrandt throughout his career. The themes are defined less in terms of traditional iconography than with regard to their emotional and intellectual content.
Chapter by chapter, new aspects of Rembrandt’s artistry are reconstructed in this way. This approach allows the reader to penetrate deeply into Rembrandt’s creative thinking. Avoiding the mechanical form of the survey, the book nonetheless covers all the major works and offers a wealth of knowledge concerning Rembrandt’s life, surroundings and posterity.
Gary Schwartz is one of the best known writers on Dutch art alive. As an historian he has written specialist articles and books, but also books for the general public and for children.
Rembrandt is one of the great innovators in art: his unique oeuvre is the result of a lifelong artistic quest. The monograph will trace this search—and the many roads along which it led him—in a manner that makes it accessible to a wide public. The Rembrandt Research Project’s most recent discoveries will throw new light on Rembrandt as a creative genius and as the driving force in an extraordinarily productive workshop. We get a glimpse of Rembrandt’s ‘laboratory’—a vibrant centre of artistic activity under his inspiring leadership. And, of course, there will be a special focus on the period from 1639 to 1658, when Rembrandt lived and worked in the Rembrandt House.
This monograph, which contains contributions by Ernst van de Wetering and other prominent Rembrandt experts, is published in conjunction with the exhibition Rembrandt—The Quest of a Genius in Museum Het Rembrandthuis and the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. This retrospective of Rembrandt’s work will be one of the main events of the Rembrandt year 2006.
Rembrandt's Landscapes
by Boudewijn Bakker, E. Melanie Gifford, Huigen Leeflang, Cynthia Schneider et al
2006
Rembrandt was an exceptional seventeenth-century painter in that he did not limit himself to one genre. He challenged the artistic standards in all genres, including that of painting landscapes. Rembrandt’s earliest landscapes were not so much realistic depictions of the world around him, which was a typical characteristic of his drawings, but representations of imaginary surroundings. In his studio he combined landscape elements from various sources, completely from his imagination. In other landscapes Rembrandt stayed closer to home: these paintings show more local features, probably inspired by the realistic motifs he sketched during his strolls in the surroundings of Amsterdam.
This book gives a comprehensive picture of Rembrandt’s development in the genre of landscapes, both in his paintings and drawings and in his etchings. It contains in-depth discussions of questions relating to the meaning, technique and position of Rembrandt’s landscapes in his oeuvre.
To mark the Rembrandt Year, all of his landscapes will be exhibited together for the first time in Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal.
Rembrandt's Bankruptcy : The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art World in Seventeeth-Century Netherlands
by Paul Crenshaw
2006
This study examines the causes, circumstances, and effects of the 1656 bankruptcy of Rembrandt van Rijn. Following a highly successful early career, Rembrandt's idiosyncratic art and lifestyle came to dominate his reputation. His evasion of responsibility to his creditors was so socially disreputable that laws in Amsterdam were quickly altered. The poor management of his finances magnified other difficulties that he had with family, paramours, friends, neighbors, and patrons. Collectively, Rembrandt's economic and social exigencies affected his living and working environment, his public station, and his art. This study examines all of these aspects of Rembrandt's bankruptcy, including his marketing practices, the appreciation of his work, and his relations with patrons, in addition to the details of the bankruptcy itself. Several patterns of short-sighted decision-making emerge as Rembrandt conducted his affairs within a constantly changing framework of relationships, a shifting set of obligations, and evolving artistic pursuits.
Uylenburgh & Son; Art and trade in Rembrandt's Days
edited by Friso Lammertse and Jaap van der Veen
2006
Until the early seventeenth century, the distribution of paintings and other art works was in the hands of the artists, but after that to an increasing extent it was taken on by specialists. The most important art dealers were active in Amsterdam, the art centre par excellence. Hendrick Uylenburgh and his son Gerrit Uylenburgh were leading figures among these dealers.
The Uylenburghs, father and son, ran an art business and at the same time headed a painters’ workshop where renowned artists worked. Rembrandt worked for this business from 1631 to 1635. He painted countless commissioned portraits and as well as historical paintings and ‘tronies’ also did grisailles and etchings. While working for this business he met Saskia Uylenburgh, a cousin of the art dealer, whom he married in 1634.
The book Uylenburgh & Son provides insight into the nature and significance of the Uylenburghs’ enterprise and also discusses their investors and customers. A great deal of new material has been found about the Uylenburgh family.
In the Print Room of the Rijksmuseum there are about sixty original drawings by Rembrandt van Rijn, ranging from a self-portrait and figure and genre studies to biblical scenes, landscapes, nudes and animals. Although Rembrandt is famous mainly as a painter, this splendid collection of drawings shows that he was also an unrivalled master of the art of drawing. In this dossier all of the drawings in the Rijksmuseum are reproduced in colour for the first time and described in texts accessible to a wide public.
'Portrait the captain and the lieutenant among their civil quards.' must have been the approximate assignment given to Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Although this commission differed little from other commissions for civil quard group portraits, The Nightwatch painted in 1642, is more exciting and original than any of the others of this genre.
This Dossier discussus Rembrandt's masterpiece in great detail. Everything is addressed, from the commission Rembrandt received to his unequalled painting technique and from Rembrandt's exceptional handling of light to the painting's reputation down through the centuries
The Rembrandt House: A Catalogue of Rembrandt Etchings
by Eva Ornstein-van Slooten and Marijke Holtrop
2006
The house on the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt lived for more than 20 years, was opened as a museum in 1911. The museum concentrated itself - with great success - on bringing together Rembrandt's graphic work.
A comprehensive illustrated catalogue of this collection is now being published for the first time. The complete collection of the Rembrandthuis, comprising more than 250 etchings as well as a number of drawings and paintings, have been included in the book. The descriptions are arranged lucidly by subject and the different chapters are all preceded by brief general introductions. Depictions and complete technical details are included of all the works as well as more substantial descriptions of a large number of them.
The book includes an extensive introduction about the history of this singular house and about the origins of the collection as well as the descriptive catalogue section. The technique of etching and Rembrandt's own specific experiments are also described. The texts have been written by Eva Ornstein-van Slooten and Marijke Holtrop.
During his life Rembrandt painted four group portraits, which have all become world-famous. Everybody knows The Night Watch, The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild and The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. Part of the fourth work, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Joan Deyman, was lost in a fire in the eighteenth century. However, the greater part of the work survived and can also be seen in this richly illustrated, compact publication.
In the seventeenth century a guild or a corps would often commission a group portrait. At that time the Netherlands was at the height of its prosperity, and it added to a person’s status to be a member of a guild or corps. An important Dutchman like Frans Banning Cocq or Nicolaes could gain even more prestige by having a portrait painted of himself in the midst of the group to which he belonged – for instance by an artist like Rembrandt, who was famous even then. Because of his exceptional working method, these paintings are not only splendid portraits, but also magnificent historical depictions of the guilds and corps of the seventeenth century.
Rembrandts Groupportraits shows all these well-known works and also devotes attention to Rembrandt’s working method in comparison with that of his contemporaries, and the creation of his group portraits.
The Rijksmuseum has one of the biggest and most important collections of the most famous painter of the Netherlands, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). This collection provides an excellent point of departure to follow the development of the great master, from his first tentative experiments to his impressive and inimitable late work. In this ‘Rijksmuseum Dossier’, not only the life and work of Rembrandt but also many other aspects of his art are discussed, such as his customers, his role as a teacher and his relationship with other great artists.
This publication provides an accessible introduction to Rembrandt’s art, explaining to a wide public why Rembrandt occupies a special position in the history of Western art.
Volker Manuth is an honorary curator of the Rijksmuseum and a professor at the Radboud University of Nijmegen; Marieke de Winkel is a freelance art historian whose PhD was on costume in Rembrandt’s paintings.
A Descriptive Catalogue Of The Etched Work Of Rembrandt Van Rhyn
by Charles Henry Middleton-Wake
2005
REPRINT of the 1878. Oversized octavo. Book lx, 341 p. 12 plates. London, J. Murray. The rarest and certainly one of the most important early catalogue raisonnes of Rembrandt's etchings. Middleton describes 329 works he considers authentic and 30, which he rejects, all in great detail, with particular attention to states. He also provides detailed, complex, and scholarly arguments justifying his acceptance or rejection of each questionable piece. He was the first to do so and thus open a new era in the study of these prints. Also includes 12 plates with illustrations of details distinguishing states and copies.
Rembrandt: Portraits in Print is the first monograph devoted to Rembrandt's etched portraits of himself and his contemporaries. Between 1633 and 1665, Rembrandt etched less than two dozen formal portraits, yet this small body of work includes some of his most finely crafted and widely sought-after prints. Rembrandt depicted influential preachers of the Remonstrant, Reformed and Mennonite faiths as well as prominent citizens such as the tax administrator Jan Wtenbogaert, the wealthy connoisseur Jan Six, the physician Arnout Tholinx and the landscape painter Jan Asselijn. Most of these men participated in a circle of artists, poets and patrons who thought of themselves as a "Dutch Parnassus."
For this community of art lovers, the celebration of individual character and accomplishment, in products ranging from imposing portrait sculptures to witty occasional verses, was a central preoccupation. In this context, Rembrandt's portrait prints construct nuanced personal tributes to individuals who appreciated both their allusive content and their pictorial finesse. At the same time, Rembrandt had to compete in a market populated by professional printmakers and publishers for whom celebrity portraiture functioned as a lucrative commodity. In a series of ambitious self-portraits, he stakes his claim to artistic excellence and personal fame. This book brings together contextual evidence such as preparatory studies, inscribed copies, and literary responses to illuminate the creation and reception of Rembrandt's etched portraits. His contribution to graphic portraiture emerges as a unique blend of innovative technique, thoughtful characterization, emulation of artistic tradition and bold competition with contemporary trends.
Until now dress has played only a subordinate role in the research of Rembrandt’s paintings, despite the fact that few artists are as intensively studied as this Dutch master. The lacuna is all the more surprising since Rembrandt obviously delighted in rendering clothes, which, for him, not only communicated the character and social status of his sitters but also clarified his narratives and heightened the drama in his historical pieces. Here, Marieke de Winkel offers a fascinating and much-needed study of dress and costume in the works of Rembrandt.
De Winkel shows us how focusing on apparel opens a new line of inquiry into Rembrandt’s paintings, one which is symbolically and iconographically richer than previously imagined. This approach, which has not been fully acknowledged by art historians nor developed by dress historians, deepens our understanding of Rembrandt’s expression as well as the cultural and historical context of the Dutch seventeenth century. De Winkel proves the merits of the approach here with her close readings of Rembrandt’s paintings and the contemporaneous connotations of the clothes he depicted. She demonstrates convincingly that clothes do much more than help date the paintings; they are instead integral to the program of representation.
Rembrandt changed the course of art history not only as a painter but also as a draftsman and printmaker. His output of some 300 etchings and drypoints represents a lifelong commitment to printmaking unequaled by any other 17th-century painter and comparable only to Picasso in our own time. Rembrandt's Journey unfolds the richness and diversity of Rembrandt's career as an etcher in the context of his paintings and drawings. Illustrated with nearly 200 works in all three media, this book traces the remarkable evolution of Rembrandt's art over four decades, from the robust physical energy of his early productions to the breadth, simplicity and meditative beauty of his later work. It establishes new and important connections among these works and among the three media that the artist explored throughout his career. It encompasses the wide range of his vision, from the tragic and spiritual to the earthy and comic. And it gives full due to Rembrandt's narrative sensibilities, showing how he endowed his figures (particularly in biblical scenes) with unprecedented psychological nuance and vividness. Published to accompany the first comprehensive American survey of his work in decades, Rembrandt's Journey offers a fresh, authoritative view of this endlessly familiar, yet still unknown, artist. Essays by Clifford S. Ackley, Ronni Baer, Thomas E. Rassieur and William W. Robinson.
From 1870 to 1935, the first true catalogues raisonnés of Rembrandt's paintings were produced, incorporating the results of individual connoisseurs' evaluations of authenticity and quality. This book, the first full-length study of this scholarly corpus, concentrates on the written connoisseurship of Wilhelm von Bode, Abraham Bredius, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, and Wilhelm Valentiner, whose articles and catalogues first shaped the modern conception of Rembrandt as a painter. In addition to analyzing their written work, Scallen addresses the social context of their connoisseurial practices, as shaped by their museum careers and their relationships with dealers and collectors.
There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries.
Rembrandt's Jews puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam--which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood--Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented--far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the
Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
by Gilles Neret
2006
This richly detailed study reconceptualizes a striking but enigmatic moment in Rembrandt's art from the 1650s - one of the artist's most prolific and creative periods. Michael Zell identifies a significant theological shift in Rembrandt's use of religious imagery and interprets this shift in light of the unique religious and social conditions of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Rembrandt's biblical art has generally been regarded as the embodiment of a Protestant aesthetic. By looking closely at the artist's relationship with his patron Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and the ideas of a group of "philosemitic" Protestants with whom the rabbi was engaged in an apologetic dialogue, Zell deepens and complicates our understanding of Rembrandt's sacred art from this period.
In 1639, Rembrandt paid an enormous sum for a grand, patrician residence in Amsterdam, today's Rembrandthuis. Rembrandt van Rijn was a fanatical collector: he spent thousands of guilders on a unique array of art and curiosities. Eventually, his passion brought him to the brink of financial disaster. By 1656 he was bankrupt and forced to sell his house and his collections. For the auction of his property an inventory was drawn up from which it is now possible to reconstruct his collection and the way he arranged it in his house. In this richly illustrated publication, Rembrandt's activities as a collector are presented to a broad public for the first time.
If Rembrandt's career had ended in 1631, before the 25-year-old artist moved from his native town of Leiden to the booming metropolis of Amsterdam, how would history remember him? This is the theme of Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt. Rembrandt's work in Leiden was already extraordinarily creative and intensely dramatic. In the years 1629 to 1631, the artist struggled to master different genres and techniques. He worked with Jan Lievens and took his first known pupil, Gerrit Dou. By the time he decided to seek his fortune in Amsterdam, his work had already achieved a unique and profound sense of color, light, and human emotion. Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt includes contributions by Alan Chong, Arthur Wheelock, Christopher White, and Mariët Westermann.
With international attention focused on the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt von Rijn’s birth, the world’s leading Rembrandt expert weighs in with a penetrating—and accessible—examination of the Dutch master’s life and art from both the biographical and the art historical perspective.
Rembrandt was an esteemed artist in his own time as well as in the present, yet there is much debate over how many paintings and drawings can really be attributed to him, and popular scholastic opinion varies widely. In his lively text, accompanied by 700 full-color illustrations, Gary Schwartz addresses the central controversies, providing art historians, students, and art lovers with essential new insights to help clarify the mysteries surrounding the great painter.