Rembrandt The Painter Thinking

Throughout his life, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was considered an exceptional artist by contemporary art lovers. In this highly original book, Ernst van de Wetering investigates why Rembrandt, from a very early age, was praised by high-placed connoisseurs like Constantijn Huygens. It turns out that Rembrandt, from his first endeavours in painting on, had embarked on a journey past all the 'foundations of the art of painting' which were considered essential in the seventeenth century. In his systematic exploration of these foundations, Rembrandt achieved mastery in all of them, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso' that count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for ever better solutions to the pictorial problems he saw himself confronted with; this sometimes led to radical decisions and alterations in his way of working, which cannot simply be explained by attributing them to a 'change in style' or a 'natural development'. In a quest as rigorous and novel as Rembrandt's, Van de Wetering shows us how Rembrandt dealt with the foundations of his art and used them to try and become the best painter the world had ever seen. His book sheds new light both on Rembrandt's exceptional accomplishments and on the practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age at large.

Rembrandts paintings have been admired throughout centuries because of their artistic freedom. But Rembrandt was also a craftsman whose painting technique was rooted the tradition. Rembrandt—The Painter at Work is the result of a lifelong search for Rembrandt's working methods, his intellectual approach to the art of painting and the way in which his studio functioned. Ernst van de Wetering demonstrates how this knowledge can be used to tackle questions about authenticity and other art-historical issues. Approximately 350 illustrations, half of which are reproduced in colour, make this book into a monumental tribute to one of the worlds most important painters. "The book is—if one may be allowed to say such a thing about a serious scholarly work—a gripping good-read.' Christopher White, The Burlington Magazine "This is a very rich book, a deeply felt analysis of an artist whom the author knows better than almost any other living scholar." Christopher Brown, Times Literary Supplement

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.

Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg's Stealing Rembrandts is a spellbinding journey into the high-stakes world of art theft Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted. In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world - from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio - the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums. There are robbers who coolly walk off with multimillion dollar paintings; self-styled art experts who fall in love with the Dutch master and desire to own his art at all costs; and international criminal masterminds who don't hesitate to resort to violence. They also show how museums are thwarted in their ability to pursue the thieves - even going so far as to conduct investigations on their own, far away from the maddening crowd of police intervention, sparing no expense to save the priceless masterpieces. Stealing Rembrandts is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind look at the black market of art theft, and how it compromises some of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

"This book owes its genesis to a series of conferences held in 2009, 2011, and 2013 at Queen's University's Bader International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex, UK." (Acknowledgements).

"Rembrandt was the most famous painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and the opportunity to work in his studio attracted young artists for nearly four decades, until the artist's death in 1669. This catalogue explores the workings of Rembrandt's studio in the form of drawings made by the master himself and fifteen of his pupils. Rembrandt and his students would often depict the same subject matter as an exercise and make drawings of the same nude models. In his later years, Rembrandt also made sketching trips outside Amsterdam to create his innovative landscapes of the Dutch countryside. His students followed this example, sometimes depicting the same sites." "Organized chronologically, Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference is a groundbreaking study that presents more than forty works by Rembrandt and related works by his pupils. It explores the scholarship of recent decades that has brought new and more systematic criteria to bear on determining the authenticity of Rembrandt drawings, and defines the styles of his pupils and followers with ever-greater precision. In so doing, this volume demystifies the sometimes-baffling exercise known as connoisseurship and seeks to re-enact the daily practices that Rembrandt used to teach his students and bring them to artistic maturity." "This is an essential book for anyone interested in the Dutch Golden Age or the lives and careers of Rembrandt and the artists in his immediate circle. A major exhibition of these drawings will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from December 8, 2009, to February 28, 2010." --Book Jacket.

Chardin and Rembrandt is an unfinished essay written around 1895 by Marcel Proust. Oft overlooked in Prousts illustrious writing career, this book is a newly translated version by David Zwirner Books as one of the first two entries in its ekphrasis series. This essay is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Learn how to jump-start your imagination to conjure up innovative, worthwhile ideas with help from some of the greatest artists in the world. How do artists think? Where does their creativity originate? How can we, too, learn to be more creative? BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz seeks answers to these questions in his exuberant, intelligent, witty, and thought-provoking style. Think Like an Artist identifies ten key lessons on creativity from artists that range from Caravaggio to Warhol, Da Vinci to Ai Weiwei, and profiles leading contemporary figures in the arts who are putting these skills to use today. After getting up close and personal with some of the world’s leading creative thinkers, Gompertz has discovered traits that are common to them all. He outlines basic practices and processes that allow your talents to flourish and enable you to embrace your inner Picasso—no matter what you do for a living. With wisdom, inspiration, and advice from an author named one of the fifty most original thinkers in the world by Creativity magazine, Think Like an Artist is an illuminating view into the habits that make people successful. It’s time to get inspired and think like an artist!

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.