This book, written by authorities in the field, maps the many developments in Rembrandt’s self-portraiture during his life and attempts to explain exactly why this genre played such a dominant role in his work. The authors give new emphasis to the tradition of self-portrayal in Netherlandish art and the impact of his innovative style on his contemporaries (whether artists or collectors) and on his followers. Significant reinterpretations of Rembrandt’s approach also arise from a close investigation of lesser-known aspects of his work, such as his manipulation of his features or his depiction of himself in a variety of highly authentic historical costumes.
Using the artist's self-portraits as a starting point, the author explains how Rembrandt exemplifies the ability to confront life with passion, honesty, and an uncompromising acceptance of who we are.
A captivating exploration of the little-known story of Rembrandt’s formative years by a prize-winning biographer. Rembrandt van Rijn’s early years are as famously shrouded in mystery as Shakespeare’s, and his life has always been an enigma. How did a miller’s son from a provincial Dutch town become the greatest artist of his age? How in short, did Rembrandt become Rembrandt? Seeking the roots of Rembrandt’s genius, the celebrated Dutch writer Onno Blom immersed himself in Leiden, the city in which Rembrandt was born in 1606 and where he spent his first twenty-five years. It was a turbulent time, the city having only recently rebelled against the Spanish. There are almost no written records by or about Rembrandt, so Blom tracked down old maps, sought out the Rembrandt family house and mill, and walked the route that Rembrandt would have taken to school. Leiden was a bustling center of intellectual life, and Blom, a native of Leiden himself, brings to life all the places Rembrandt would have known: the university, library, botanical garden, and anatomy theater. He investigated the concerns and tensions of the era: burial rites for plague victims, the renovation of the city in the wake of the Spanish siege, the influx of immigrants to work the cloth trade. And he examined the origins and influences that led to the famous and beloved paintings that marked the beginning of Rembrandt’s celebrated career as the paramount painter of the Dutch Golden Age. Young Rembrandt is a fascinating portrait of the artist and the world that made him. Evocatively told and beautifully illustrated with more than 100 color images, it is a superb biography that captures Rembrandt for a new generation.
John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.
This deluxe hardcover edition features drawings by the Dutch master from the collections of more than 20 European and American museums. Beautifully produced in a generous format on high-quality paper, this volume spans the artist's prolific career and includes superb examples of landscapes, biblical vignettes, figure studies, animal sketches, and portraits.
Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, examines Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings against the background of established pictorial traditions in the Netherlands and Italy. Exploring Rembrandt’s intense dialogue with the works of predecessors and peers, Sluijter demonstrates that, more than any other artist, Rembrandt set out to incite the greatest possible empathy in the viewer, an approach that had far-reaching consequences for the moral and erotic implications of the subjects Rembrandt chose to depict. In this richly illustrated study, Sluijter presents an innovative approach to Rembrandt’s views on the art of painting, his attitude towards antiquity and Italian art of the Renaissance, his sustained rivalry with the works of other artists, his handling of the moral and erotic issues inherent in subjects with female nudes, and the nature of his artistic choices.
Rembrandt's drawings display his emotional state with a candor unseen in other works. They function as a repository for his unfiltered feelings and perspectives of the world that surrounded him. Be it through haunting sketches of his first wife in the grips of a fatal case of tuberculosis, simple scenes of street life, or studies of elephants and tigers, Rembrandt communicates his feverish thirst for images, and his ability to represent these through the lens of his immediate emotional state. Commemorating the 350th anniversary of the artist's death and published in tandem with an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum of unprecedented scale, this stunning XXL monograph is the complete collection of Rembrandt's works on paper. Through the 700 drawings, brilliantly printed in color for the first time, and 313 etchings in pristine reproduction, we explore Rembrandt's keen eye, deft hand, and boundless depth of feeling like never before; and above all, we witness that he was far more than just a painter.
For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.
