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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 1999) |
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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 1997) Amsterdam Univ Press
Fictions
of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance
Paperback - 534 pages
(April 2000) 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 (May 1998)
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)
Hardcover (December 1991) Yale Univ Press
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 (August 1999)
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 (May 1990) Yale Univ Press
Out of Print - Try Used
Books
Landscapes of Rembrandt
by Boudewijn Bakker, Maria van Berge-Gerbaud
Hardcover - 392 pages (January 1999) Uitgeverij Thoth
Out of Print - Try Used
Books
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)
Out of Print - Try Used
Books
Rembrandt (First Impressions Series)
by Gary D. Schwartz
Hardcover, 92 pages, Published by Harry N Abrams, 1992
A biography of Rembrandt
Out of Print - Try Used
Books
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
Out of Print - Try Used
Books
Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity
by H. Perry Chapman
Paperback Reprint edition (October 1992)
Princeton Univ Press
Out of Print - Try Used
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