REMBRANDT - IMAGES & METAPHORS

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606-1669)

Rembrandt used the achievements of his teachers, predecessors and contemporaries to develop and realise his own artistic aims and abilities, and it was to these too that he owed his basic artistic impulses. His urge to achieve unmistakable originality led him to overturn aesthetic and thematic conventions; he expanded technique and experimented with the use of colour and forms of etching. Although the art of the past always served him as a starting point, he sought to surpass it by staging works that were both unexpectedly daring and apposite to their subject.‘Well worth reading’ The Spectator‘An impressive accomplishment! 

Art Times

'Rembrandt was, above all, a paitner and etcher of scenes from the Old and New Testaments and it is in the description of his interpretations of these texts that Dr Tumpel is unrivalled among modern writers on the artist. The analysis, for example, of Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, the great painting of 1656 - the year of Rembrandt's bankruptcy, incidentally - at Kassel, is truly instructive and enlightening, and it is just one of many such rich and cogent analyses. Dr Tumpel's book is ... the product of long and mature reflection on the art of Rembrandt and, in particular, on his religious art.'

Christopher Brown, Director, Ashmolean Museum Oxford, The Art Newspaper, No. 186, December 2007

Contents: Foreword - Rembrandt’s Youth in Leiden and his Training as a Painter - Constantin Huygens Discovers Rembrandt and Jan Lievens - The Language of Baroque - Self-Portraits - Rembrandt the Etcher - Rembrandt Gains Recognition in Amsterdam - Rembrandt and Saskia - Rembrandt’s Commissions from Prince Frederick Hendrick - Rembrandt and Judaism - The Biblical Histories of the First Amsterdam Period - An Uncommon Subject - Rembrandt and Antiquity - Self-Portraits of the Baroque Period - Rembrandt Again Accepts Portrait Commissions - The Night Watch: Myth and Reality - Rembrandt’s Crisis and the Art of the 1640s: The Hidden Symbolism of the New Testament Depictions - The Hundred Guilder Print: Suggestions of how the Story Hangs Together - Geertghe Dircx and Hendrickje Stoffels - Etchings of the 1650s - Paintings of the 1650s - The Language of Pictures