Google honours the birth date of Rembrandt with a Google Doodle.
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| Google Doodle 15 July 2013 |
I am an admirer and follower of art and find inspiration from a variety of artist and art forms; across all spectrum's, genres, timelines etc.
Today I share this post in honor of a Dutch Master....
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher.
Rembrandt is considered the most important painter in Dutch History and as one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art.
His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age when Dutch Golden Age painting, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative.
Famous Rembrandt van Rijn works of art: (in no particular order)
It is difficult to choose favorites, invariably that list is different from person to person. Below some famous ones. Go the link at the bottom to view the complete collection.The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp c. 1632
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| The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp - 169.5 x 216.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague |
The Night Watch c.1642 (The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenhurch)
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| The Night Watch - 363 x 438 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
The Feast of Belshazzar: The Writing on the Wall c. 1635
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| The Feast of Belshazzar: the Writing on the Wall - oil on canvas 65 3/4 x 79 1/8 in. National Gallery, London |
And then, just because I know we can all do with a bit of light reading :-)
A bit about "The Legend and the Man," in The World of Rembrandt: 1606-1669 (Time-Life Library of Art), Walter Wallace, New York, 1968, pp. 17-25
In life Rembrandt suffered far more misfortune than falls to the lot of an ordinary man, and he bore it with the utmost nobility. Three centuries after his death the misfortune, if a man long deceased can be said to endure such a thing, continues. To be sure, it is no longer the fashion for critics to attack him both as artist and human being. Today the injury is done with a fond smile by writers of romantic biographies and films who mean to honor him. Their revised standard version of Rembrandt's life runs approximately as follows:
"The child of poor, ignorant Dutch peasants, Rembrandt was born with near-miraculous skill in art. As an uneducated young man, he established himself in Amsterdam, married a beautiful, wealthy, sympathetic girl named Saskia, and enjoyed a brief period of prosperity and fame.
However, because men of genius are always misunderstood by the public, fate snatched him by the throat. The important burghers of the city, who may not have known much about art but knew what they liked, gave him an enormous commission - the Night Watch - in which the burghers were to be painted in traditional postures and lights.
Rembrandt responded with a masterpiece, a fact unfortunately apparent only to him and his wife. Everyone else, from the burghers to the herring-peddlers, thought the painting was dreadful. Rembrandt's patrons hooted in rage and derision, demanding changes that the artist, secure in the knowledge that posterity would vindicate him, stubbornly refused to make.
"At this point, because it is not customary for a genius to suffer a single setback but to be overwhelmed by multiple catastrophes, Rembrandt's wife died, the Night Watch was ripped from the wall and placed in some indecorous location, his friends deserted him .and he was hounded into bankruptcy. In his final years no one would commission a painting from him; he was reduced to making self-portraits, which he did whenever he could cadge the necessary materials from his art-supply dealer.
His only comforters were his san Titus and his mistress Hendrickje, both of whom died in heartrending circumstances. Prematurely aged at 63, he passed away in such obscurity that the burghers, observing his pathetic funeral, inquired, 'Who was he?'
However, even at that dark hour the mills of the gods were slowly grinding, and in our own time the verdict in favor of Rembrandt's greatness has been amply reaffirmed by the trustees of New York's Metropolitan Museum, who not long ago paid 52.3 million for his Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer and were very lucky to get it at the price. Indeed, as the Metropolitan's director Thomas Hoving recently remarked, 'Look at that chain [on Aristotle's shoulder]. That alone is worth two million three!' "
The foregoing summary is an interesting and tidy one, and presents the view of Rembrandt generally seen by the world. In most respects, however, it is dead wrong.
- Rembrandt was not a peasant;
- nor was he uneducated;
- the Night Watch did not bring about his downfall; indeed,
- he never had a "downfall" in the dramatic sense. And
- when he died, there remained more than a few people who held him in the highest regard.
Nonetheless, myths die hard, and that of Rembrandt is durable. In the United States the myth is particularly widespread, in part because of a 1936 film in which Charles Laughton portrayed the artist. Despite its age, Laughton's Rembrandt remains a valuable commercial property, is frequently shown on television, and has been seen and presumably accepted at face value by an enormous number of people, upwards of 100 million.
However, through no fault of Laughton's, who in private life was a serious connoisseur of art, the script with which he was obliged to work was not a masterpiece of accuracy. Whenever the film is shown, another half-million viewers are exposed to the myth, but whenever a scholar ferrets out a new scrap of truth about Rembrandt and publishes it in an art journal, only a relative handful of fellow-scholars are aware of it. There is, of course, nothing novel in this situation-Michelangelo, Leonardo, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and others have been similarly treated-but Rembrandt has endured more than the rules of the game should allow.
In Rembrandt's case myth-making comes easily as an alternative to fact-finding. Romantics and scholars alike are handicapped by a scarcity of contemporary information, not only about Rembrandt but about most of the artists who participated in the great sunburst of painting in the Netherlands of the 17th Century.
Rembrandt left no journal or notebook, and only seven of his letters have been located-all addressed to the same man, concerning a specific project and revealing little of his thought or personality. Yet even this thin sheaf is comparatively a rich hoard. From the hands of other major artists of Rembrandt's time - Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael - not a solitary note has been found. Possibly Dutch artists rarely wrote letters, but it seems more likely that their correspondence was not thought worth keeping.
Read more from http://www.rembrandtpainting.net
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