Rembrandt Rubens And The Art Of Their Time

Contents 1. Rembrandt Self-Portraits: The Creation of a Myth - Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., National Gallery of Art, Washington 2. Reconstructing Rembrandt and His Circle: More on the Workshop Hypothesis - Walter Liedtke, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 3. Rembrandt at the Threshold - Susan Donahue Kuretsky, Vassar College 4. Comments on Rubens' Coup de Lance: Its Iconography, Style, and Importance for Eugène Delacroix - J. Richard Judson, Prof. Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 5. Rubens, His Patrons and Style - Walter Liedtke, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 6. Gender Issues in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture: A New Look - Alison McNeil Kettering, Carleton College 7. Remarks on Love, Woman, and the Garden in Netherlandish Art: A Study in the Iconology of the Garden - Sara M. Wages, The University of Maryland 8. The Strange Case of Jan Torrentius: Art, Sex, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Haarlem - Christopher Brown, The National Gallery, London 9. The Soothsayer by Jan Lievens in Berlin: An Attempt at an Interpretation - Maarten Wurfbain, Oegstgeest, The Netherlands 10. Ludolf de Jongh's The Refused Glass and Its Effects on the Art of Vermeer and De Hooch -Roland E. Fleischer, Prof. Emeritus, The Pennsylvania State University

The question of whether seventeenth-century painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens were exclusively responsible for the paintings later sold under their names has caused many a heated debate. Despite the rise of scholarship on the history of the art market, much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed during this period, which leads to several provocative questions: did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings as genuine? The contributors to this engaging collection—Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet, and Neil De Marchi, among them—trace these issues through the booming art market of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arriving at fascinating and occasionally unexpected conclusions.

An extraordinary history of Netherlandish drawing, focused on the training and skill of artists during the long 17th century With a lively narrative thread and thematic chapters, this book offers an exceptional introduction to Dutch and Flemish drawing during the long 17th century. Victoria Sancho Lobis discusses the many roles of drawing in artistic training, its function in the production of works in other media, and its emergence as a medium in its own right. Beautifully illustrated with some 120 drawings by artists including Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrick Goltzius, Gerrit von Honthorst, and Jacob De Gheyn, this book surveys current methodologies of studying these works and features a brief history of Dutch papermaking and watermarks as well as a glossary. Paying careful attention to materials and techniques, and informed by recent conservation treatments, Lobis explains how to look at these drawings as records of experimentation and skill, true windows into the artist’s mind.

This superb book presents 100 notable examples from the Harvard Art Museums’ distinguished collection of Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings from the 16th to 18th century. Featuring such masters as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn, the volume showcases beautiful color illustrations accompanied by insightful commentary on prevalent styles and techniques. Genres that define this artistic period—landscape, scenes of everyday life, portraiture, and still life—are explored in detail. The book also presents the results of new conservation and technical study, including infrared analysis and scientific examinations of drawing materials. This revelatory new research has allowed previously illegible underdrawings and inscriptions in many of the artworks to surface for the first time, shedding light on longstanding mysteries of production and provenance.

A revised survey of Rembrandt’s complete painted oeuvre. The question of which 17th-century paintings in Rembrandt’s style were actually painted by Rembrandt himself had already become an issue during his lifetime. It is an issue that is still hotly disputed among art historians today. The problem arose because Rembrandt had numerous pupils who learned the art of painting by imitating their master or by assisting him with his work as a portrait painter. He also left pieces unfinished, to be completed by others. The question is how to determine which works were from Rembrandt’s own hand. Can we, for example, define the criteria of quality that would allow us to distinguish the master’s work from that of his followers? Do we yet have methods of investigation that would deliver objective evidence of authenticity? To what extent do research techniques used in the physical sciences help? Or are we, after all, still dependent on the subjective, expert eye of the connoisseur? The book provides answers to these questions. Prof. Ernst van de Wetering, the author of our forthcoming book which deals with these questions, has been closely involved in all aspects of this research since 1968, the year the renowned Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) was founded. In particular, he played an important role in developing new criteria for authentication. Van de Wetering was also witness to the way the often overly zealous tendency to doubt the authenticity of Rembrandt’s paintings got out of hand. In this book he re-attributes to the master a substantial number of unjustly rejected Rembrandts. He also was closely involved in the (re)discovery of a considerable number of lost or completely unknown works by Rembrandt. The verdicts of earlier specialists – including the majority of members of the original RRP (up to 1989) – were based on connoisseurship: the self-confidence in one’s ability to recognise a specific artist’s style and ‘hand’. Over the years, Van de Wetering has carried out seminal research into 17th-century studio practice and ideas about art current in Rembrandt’s time. In this book he demonstrates the fallibility of traditional connoisseurship, especially in the case of Rembrandt, who was par excellence a searching artist. The methodological implications of this critical view are discussed in an introductory chapter which relates the history of the developments in this turbulent field of research. Van de Wetering’s account of his own involvement in it makes this book a lively and sometimes unexpectedly personal account. The catalogue section presents a chronologically ordered survey of Rembrandt’s entire painted oeuvre of 336 paintings, richly illustrated and annotated. For all the paintings re-attributed in this book, extensive commentaries have been included that provide a multi-facetted new insight into Rembrandt’s world and the world of art-historical research. Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited is the concluding sixth volume of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (Volumes I-V; 1982, 1986, 1989, 2005, 2010). It can also be read as a revisionary critique of the first three Volumes published by the old RRP team up till 1989 and of Gerson’s influential survey of Rembrandt’s painted oeuvre of 1968/69. At the same time, the book is designed as an independent overview that can be used on the basis that anyone seeking more detailed information will be referred to the five previous (digital versions of the) Volumes and the detailed catalogues published in the meantime by the various museums with collections of Rembrandt paintings. This work of art history and art research should belong in the library of every serious art historical institute, university or museum.

Although his popularity is eclipsed by Rembrandt today, Peter Paul Rubens was revered by his contemporaries as the greatest painter of his era, if not of all history. His undeniable artistic genius, bolstered by a modest disposition and a reputation as a man of tact and discretion, made him a favorite among monarchs and political leaders across Europe—and gave him the perfect cover for the clandestine activities that shaped the landscape of seventeenth-century politics. In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster brilliantly recreates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of Rubens’s time, following the painter from Antwerp to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome and providing an insightful exploration of Rubens’s art as well as the private passions that influenced it.

In 1875 Eugène Fromentin toured Flanders and Holland to study Dutch painting. He visited churches, museums, and private collections, and jotted down his personal impressions on the spot. The result was The masters of past time--a delightful, sensitive book. In his own foreword Fromentin speaks modestly of his aim: "I shall merely describe, in the presence of certain pictures, the effects of surprise, pleasure, astonishment, and no less exactly of disappointment, which they happened to cause me." As a painter himself Fromentin was absorbed by the technique of the paintings he studied, and he describes the works with directness and simplicity, but also with a subtle and critical intelligence.--Back cover.