Rembrandt

 
 

Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama The great 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn left us so many arresting self-portraits, painted at every stage in his eventful life, that his distinctive face and bearing are a familiar part of the 20th-century cultural landscape, a recognizable presence in galleries across Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the artist himself remains an enigma. Rembrandt was a notoriously difficult man and an inveterate risk taker in life and art: his aspirations to a grandiose Amsterdam lifestyle in the heyday of his popularity as a painter of portraits and large-scale historical works bankrupted him, and he died in relative poverty. His personal effects and treasured collection of paintings and natural rarities were sold off and dispersed, leaving the historian with a tantalizingly scant body of fragmentary records around which to build a convincing biography.  In Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama--the leading historical craftsman of our era, with a career-long commitment to Dutch history--succeeds with consummate skill in bringing the heroic painter of such masterpieces as The Night Watch and Portrait of Jan Six vividly to life. Returning to the bustling Dutch world with which he first made his reputation in the bestselling Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Schama re-creates Rembrandt's life and times with all the verve and panache of a historical novelist--while never for an instant losing his scrupulous grip on recorded fact and detail. The telling surviving fragments of archival information about Rembrandt's personal and professional history are skillfully embedded in a rich, dense tapestry of the commercial whirl and political hurly-burly of the 17th-century Low Countries--a divided territory, split between the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the contested powers of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Dutch Republic--with the tentacles of the tale reaching into the most unexpected shadowy corners of European love and war, aspiration and intrigue. Rembrandt's Eyes is, in fact, two biographies for the price of one. From the outset, Schama contrasts the life of Rembrandt with that of his older, equally talented countryman Peter Paul Rubens, whose meteoric rise and sustained success as a society painter forms a revealing contrast with Rembrandt's unhappier relationship with fame and fortune. The comparison is a telling one. Where Rubens furnishes the wealthy and powerful with glorious reflections of, and visual foils for, their social and political aspirations and glory, Rembrandt can never resist testing the envelope of taste and stylistic acceptability. His challenge to his clients to embrace the shock of his painterly experiments with technique, texture, and composition ultimately produced his downfall. The Amsterdam town council took down his The Oath-swearing of Claudius Civilis, rolled it up, and returned his masterpiece to him to be cut down in an attempt to sell it to a suitable buyer. This is a gorgeous book to own, too. Rembrandt's Eyes is printed on heavy, high-gloss paper and lavishly illustrated throughout in full color. The double-page color spreads of the most memorable of Rembrandt's works will take readers' breath away. But above all, this is narrative history at its very best, a page-turner and an adventure story that will make the reader laugh and cry by turns in the time-honored tradition of masterly writing. --Lisa Jardine - Amazon.com Hardcover: 750 pages Knopf; ISBN: 067940256X; (November )

Rembrandt: The Painter at Work
by Ernst Van De Wetering
"Ernst van de Wetering's wonderful book has taken us further than almost any study over the past twenty years, towards an understanding of the machinery of Rembrandt's genius. . . . No one attempting to write about Rembrandt in the future will be able to do so without taking this fine work into account. It is a really stunning achievement and will change the whole course of Rembrandt studies for many generations." Simon Schama
Hardcover (November ) Amsterdam Univ Press

Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance
Paperback - 534 pages
(April ) Stanford Univ Press
 

Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact by Albert Blankert In recent years Rembrandt's oeuvre and influence have been hotly debated. A number of paintings hitherto said to be his have been reattributed by some scholars to pupils or even to obscure followers. This lavishly illustrated book, containing essays by some of the world's leading scholars on seventeenth-century Dutch art, is the first critical review of the present state Rembrandt studies finds itself in as a result. The Publisher. Hardcover, 450 pages Consortium Book Sales & Dist

Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market
by Svetlana Alpers
Paperback Reprint edition (January 1991)
Univ of Chicago Pr (Trd)

Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop: Paintings/Drawings and Etchings
by Christopher Brown, Pieter Van Theil
Hardcover (December 1991) Yale Univ Press

Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop: Paintings
by Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, Pieter Van Thiel (Editor)
Together with "Rembrandt: The Master and his Workshop (Drawings and Etchings)", this book serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition of Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and etchings opening at the Altes Museum in Berlin and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1991. Paintings and etchings from this exhibition will later be on display at the National Gallery in London; the drawings will be shown at the British Museum. In this volume on the paintings, prominent experts discuss Rembrandt's life, his technique, the organization of his workshop, and the history of critical response to him. The authors then present detailed studies of 51 paintings definately attributed to Rembrandt, from his earliest biblical subjects to the last self-portrait. The final section of the book discusses the work of Rembrandt's pupils, including Ferdinand Bol, Gerrit Dou, and Nicolaes Maes. Paintings once assumed to be by Rembrandt are attributed to these pupils and are related to other works they have done. 
Hardcover (December 1991) Yale Univ Press
ISBN: 0300051492
 

Rembrandt: Master of the Portrait (Discoveries Series) by Pascal Bonafoux Paperback, 175 pages Published by Harry N Abrams (Pap), 1992

Rembrandt by Himself
by Christopher White (Editor), Quentin Buvelot (Editor)
Hardcover - 256 pages
Yale Univ Press

Rembrandt's Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter (Masterpieces of Westerm Painting)
by Ann Jensen Adams (Editor), Eric Jan Sluijter (Contributor), Svetlana Alpers (Contributor)

The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt: Reproduced in Original Size
by Rembrandt Van Rijn, Gary Schwartz (Editor)
Bk&Pst/rep Edition, Paperback, Published by Dover Pubns, 1994

Rembrandt Studies
by Julius S. Held
Revised, Hardcover, 211 pages
Published by Princeton Univ Press, 1991
Out of Print - Try Used Books

Rembrandt (World of Art)
by Christopher White
Paperback, Published by Thames & Hudson, 1984

Rembrandt's Landscapes
by Cynthia P. Schneider
Hardcover - 289 pages Yale Univ Press
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Landscapes of Rembrandt
by Boudewijn Bakker, Maria van Berge-Gerbaud
Hardcover - 392 pages Uitgeverij Thoth
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A Weekend With Rembrandt
by Pascal Bonafoux
Hardcover, 64 pages, Published by Rizzoli Intl Pubns, 1994
The seventeenth-century Dutch painter talks about his life and work as if entertaining the reader for the weekend. Includes reproductions of the artist's works and a list of museums where works are on display. (Juvenile)
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Rembrandt (First Impressions Series)
by Gary D. Schwartz
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 92 pages 
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (April 30, 1992) 
Language: English 
ISBN-10: 0810937603 
A biography of Rembrandt

What Makes a Rembrandt a Rembrandt?
by Richard Muhlberger
Explores such art topics as style, composition, color, and subject matter as they relate to twelve works by Rembrandt.
Paperback, 48 pages, Published by Viking Press, 1993
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Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity
by H. Perry Chapman
Paperback Reprint edition (October 1992)
Princeton Univ Press
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