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The History of Western Art by 
Anthony Van Dyck by
Van Dyck was accustomed early to Rubens' sumptuous lifestyle; and, when he visited Italy with letters of introduction from his master, lived in the palaces of his patrons, himself adopting such an elegant ostentation that he was spoken of as 'the Cavalier Painter'. After his return to Antwerp his patrons belonged to the rich and noble class, and his own style of living was modelled on theirs; so that, when in 1632 he received the appointment of court painter to Charles I of England, he maintained an almost princely establishment, and his house at Blackfriars was a resort of fashion. The last two years of his life were spent travelling on the Continent with his young wife, the daughter of Lord Gowry. His health, however, had been broken by the excesses of work, and he returned to London to die. He was buried at St. Paul's Cathedral. Van Dyck tried to amalgamate the influences of Italy (Titian, Veronese, Bellini) and Flanders and he succeeded in some paintings, which have a touching grace, notably in his Madonnas and Holy Families, his Crucifixions and Depositions from the Cross, and also in some of his mythological compositions. In his younger days he painted many altarpieces full of sensitive religious feeling and enthusiasm. However, his main glory was as a portraitist, the most elegant and aristocratic ever known. The great Portrait of Charles I in the Louvre is a work unique for its sovereign elegance. In his portraits, he invented a style of elegance and refinement which became a model for the artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, corresponding as it did to the genteel luxury of the court life of the period. He is also considered one of the greatest colourists in the history of art.
Anthony Van Dyck: Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel by
During his first visit to London, Anthony van Dyck produced his portrait of Thomas Howard. It marked the beginning of van Dyck's brilliant international career. Thomas Howard, a prominent member of the court of James I, was to become one of the greatest and most enlightened collectors and patrons England has ever known. In this probing study, White provides a history both of Howard, and of van Dyck, whose canvases established the grand tradition of portraiture both in England and on the Continent. This volume in the Getty Museum Studies in Art series offers not only a complete study of a great painting but also a primer on how great collections are formed and great careers are launched.
Architecture in the Age of Reason by 
Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting by 
Baroque Art by
The Baroque period lasted from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Baroque art was artists' response to the Catholic Church's demand for solemn grandeur following the Council of Trent, and through its monumentality and grandiloquence it seduced the great European courts. Amongst the Baroque arts, architecture has, without doubt, left the greatest mark in Europe: the continent is dotted with magnificent Baroque churches and palaces, commissioned by patrons at the height of their power. The works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini of the Southern School and Peter Paul Rubens of the Northern School alone show the importance of this artistic period. Rich in images encompassing the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, this work offers a complete insight into this passionate period in the history of art.
Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting by
Caterpillage is a study of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. It develops an interpretive approach based on the author's previous studies of portraiture, and its goal is to offer its readers a new way to think and talk about the genre of still life. The book begins with a critique of iconographic discourse and particularly of iconography's treatment of vanitas symbolism. It goes on to argue that this treatment tends to divert attention from still life's darker meanings and from the true character of its traffic with death. Interpretations of still life that focus on the vanity of human experience and the mutability of life minimize the impact made by the representation of such voracious pillagers of plant life as insects, snails, and caterpillars. The message sent by still life's preoccupation with these small-scale predators is not merely vanitas. It is rapacitas. Caterpillage also explores the impact of this message on the meaning of the genre's French name. We use the conventional term nature morte ("dead nature") without giving any thought to how misleading it is. Because so many portrayals of still life involve cut flowers, which, although still in bloom, are dying, it would be more accurate to name the genre nature mourant. The subjects of still life are plants that are still living, plants that are dying but not yet dead.
Claude Lorrain by
Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain was neither a great man nor a lofty spirit like Poussin. His genius cannot, however, be denied and he was, like Poussin, a profoundly original inventor within the limitations of a classical ideal. He too spent most of his life in Rome though the art he created was not specifically Italian, but French. For more than two centuries afterwards everyone in France who felt called upon to depict the beauties of nature would think of Lorrain and study his works, whether it be Joseph Vernet in the eighteenth century or Corot in the nineteenth. Outside France it was the same; Lorrain was nowhere more admired than in England. There is an element of mystery in the vocation of this humble and almost illiterate peasant whose knowledge of French and Italian was equally poor, and who used to inscribe on his drawings notes in a strange broken Franco-Italian. This mystery is in some way symbolic of that with which he imbued his pictures, le mystère dans la lumière. This admirable landscapist drew from within himself the greatest number of extraordinary pictures, in which all is beauty, poetry and truth. He sometimes made from nature drawings so beautiful that several have been attributed to Poussin, but in his paintings his imagination dominates, growing in magnitude as he realised his genius. He understood by listening to Poussin and watching him paint that a sort of intellectual background would be an invaluable addition to his own imagination, visions, dreams and reveries.
A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art by
A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history. Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700 Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book
Harmensz Van Rijn Rembrandt by
Rembrandt is completely mysterious in his spirit, his character, his life, his work and his method of painting. What we can divine of his essential nature comes through his painting and the trivial or tragic incidents of his unfortunate life; his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy. His misfortunes are not entirely explicable, and his oeuvre reflects disturbing notions and contradictory impulses emerging from the depths of his being, like the light and shade of his pictures. In spite of this, nothing perhaps in the history of art gives a more profound impression of unity than his paintings, composed though they are of such different elements, full of complex significations. One feels as if his intellect, that genial, great, free mind, bold and ignorant of all servitude and which led him to the loftiest meditations and the most sublime reveries, derived from the same source as his emotions. From this comes the tragic element he imprinted on everything he painted, irrespective of subject; there was inequality in his work as well as the sublime, which may be seen as the inevitable consequence of such a tumultuous existence. It seems as though this singular, strange, attractive and almost enigmatic personality was slow in developing, or at least in attaining its complete expansion. Rembrandt showed talent and an original vision of the world early, as evidenced in his youthful etchings and his first self-portraits of about 1630. In painting, however, he did not immediately find the method he needed to express the still incomprehensible things he had to say, that audacious, broad and personal method which we admire in the masterpieces of his maturity and old age. In spite of its subtlety, it was adjudged brutal in his day and certainly contributed to alienate his public.From the time of his beginnings and of his successes, however, lighting played a major part in his conception of painting and he made it the principal instrument of his investigations into the arcana of interior life. It already revealed to him the poetry of human physiognomy when he painted The Philosopher in Meditation or the Holy Family, so deliciously absorbed in its modest intimacy, or, for example, in The Angel Raphael leaving Tobias. Soon he asked for something more. The Night Watch marks at once the apotheosis of his reputation. He had a universal curiosity and he lived, meditated, dreamed and painted thrown back on himself. He thought of the great Venetians, borrowing their subjects and making of them an art out of the inner life of profound emotion. Mythological and religious subjects were treated as he treated his portraits. For all that he took from reality and even from the works of others, he transmuted it instantly into his own substance.
In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias by
Collected in memory of the Vermeer scholar and Yale economist J. Michael Montias, these essays take into account the latest trends in the field and provide new data on a wide range of topics in Netherlandish art. Themes include the reception of paintings and architecture; art collecting as interpreted through inventories and other documents that reveal modes of display; relationships between patrons and painters; recently found or attributed works of art; artists as teachers; and the art market. Taken together, these focused studies offer fresh perspectives on the historical appreciation and evaluation of art.Drawing upon J.M. Montias' contribution to art history, these 32 essays present new analyses, attributions, and documents on Netherlandish art and material culture - including the work of Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Eyck and others - by internationally known scholars of art history and the economics of art
Ink and Light: The Influence of Claude Lorrain's Etchings on England by
Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), an eminent seventeenth-century landscape painter, was an equally talented graphic artist. Lorrain's etchings match the mastery and execution of his paintings and yet are largely unrecognized by contemporary collectors and art historians. Andrew Brink, an astute and discriminating art collector, amassed an impressive collection of etchings, engravings, and mezzotints by European master printmakers from the sixteenth century onwards. The keystone works in the Brink Collection, now housed in Guelph, Ontario's Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, are by Claude Lorrain. In Ink and Light, Brink positions Lorrain's prints as seminal to the establishment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics in England, which gave rise to the English pictorialism in art and landscape architecture that would have international influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He discusses the technical and material character of Lorrain's etchings, as well as their connection to literature and philosophy in early modern times. While Brink's main focus is the impact of the etchings, he also looks at paintings and drawings by Lorrain, in addition to works made by other artists after Lorrain. Featuring forty of Claude Lorrain's etchings from the Brink Collection, Ink and Light fills a significant gap in British art history by providing a close reading of Lorrain's prints, their reception in England, and the enduring impact they had on a distinctive British aesthetic.
Jan Steen: The Drawing Lesson by
In this fascinating exploration of Jan Steen's The Drawing Lesson, John Walsh offers an explanation of the individual parts and larger patterns of the work, allowing us to see how each prop and pose contributes to the larger theme--the art of painting and the education of the artist. He also recounts Steen's career and the history of the picture itself, presenting, in sum, not only an examination of a fine painting but also a lesson in how to look at and "read" a complex work of art.
Jan Vermeer by
Includes magnificent color reproductions of the entire body of the artist's work & a detailed analysis of each painting, along with an extensive biography of the artist.
The Learned Eye: Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist's Reputation by
The 'learned eye' or oculus eruditus was a concept used by seventeenth-century writers on painting. It illustrated their view that the ideal artist was not only skilled in painting techniques, but also had knowledge of the history of art and an interest in poetry and literature. In this book, dedicated to Rembrandt scholar Ernst van de Wetering, the 'learned eye' refers to the experienced eye of the art historian, the curator, or the restorer. More specifically, the concept explains an issue central to understanding seventeenth-century art and its context: the artist's concern with the intellectual and social status of his profession. The book contains contributions on Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Poussin and others, all linked by the theme of the 'learned eye', focusing on studio practice, theory of art, or the development of the artist's self-image. These themes reflect the scope of research and teaching of Ernst van de Wetering who first trained as an artist before becoming an art historian. Since 1987 he has been professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam, and, for more than ten years, the inspiring leader of the Rembrandt Research Project. The importance of starting with the art object itself is a familiar concept to anyone who has attended the lectures of Ernst van de Wetering, whose own familiarity with the painter's craft, with Rembrandt's studio practice, and the history of art has 'opened the eyes' of many. This book brings together essays by some of Van de Wetering's students, colleagues and friends, who were influenced in different ways by his approach to the art of painting. The contributors touch on four main issues. The first concerns material aspects of the work of art. Second, these findings are confronted with the rules of art that were recorded by contemporaries. Third, the 'learned eye' figures as part of the artists' desire to enhance the status of their profession. The fourth issue situates painting in its context of patrons and art lovers, who wanted to learn the basic principles of painting and obtain 'eruditos oculos' themselves.
A Light of Her Own by
In Holland 1633, a woman'sambition has no place. Judith is a painter, dodging the law and whispers of murder to try to become the first woman admitted to the Haarlem painters guild. Maria is a Catholic in a country where the faith is banned, hoping to absolve her sins by recovering a lost saint's relic. Both women's destinies will be shaped by their ambitions, running counter to the city's most powerful men, whose own plans spell disaster. A vivid portrait of a remarkable artist, A Light of Her Own is a richly-woven story of grit against the backdrop of Rembrandt and an uncompromising religion. Story behind the story . . . The trail of Judith Leyster's career was so faint that only years after her death in 1660, collectors began attributing her few surviving paintings to other artists. She signed her work with only a beautiful, stylized monogram. Credit went to Frans Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer, and others. She would remain lost to history until 1893.
The Louvre by
"The recent vast expansion, transformation and reorganization of the Louvre, and the building of I.M. Pei's controversial glass pyramid in its midst, has drawn attention to the architecture of this extraordinary building - a building which for eight hundred years has been at the center of French history and culture, and to which France's greatest architects, sculptors and painters have given their most inspired work." "Beneath the ground, but now easily accessible to visitors, are substantial remains of the medieval castle." "It is time, for a new assessment of the Louvre's architectural history. Genevieve Bresc, provides an authoritative guide to every period, including the army of artists and craftsmen who enriched its interiors. Two hundred seductive color plates by the leading architectural photographer Keiichi Tahara reveal the Louvre in all its glory as it has never been seen before."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits by
A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an account of the genre's comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader's enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters' expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt's painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as the artist's covert parody of the sitters.
Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-century Metaphysics by
From the Japanese Zen Garden to Andr Le Notre's Versailles, the history of landscape reveals that every garden embodies a philosophy. Focusing on the metaphysics, aesthetics, and theology of the seventeenth century, Allen Weiss's analysis offers new insight into the major gardens of this period: Vaux-le-Vicomte, Chantilly, and Versailles. From the Meditations of Descartes and Pascal's Penss, to the intrigues of court politics, Weiss reveals how the structure of these gardens reflects--sometimes literally--the power of Louis XIV, the relationship between God, King, sun, and infinity, and the new science of optics. Weiss's sophisticated yet highly readable text combines contemporary theory with a careful historical reading. He gives us a richer understanding of gardens than allowed in more traditional formal and stylistic analyses.
The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV by
The Palace of the Sun is the first substantial book-length study of the parts of the Louvre built under Louis XIV in the 1660s and 1670s since Louis Hautecoeur's Le Louvre et les Tuileries de Louis XIV (1927). Berger discusses a broad range of topics, from architectural symbolism to structural analysis. All the varied ideas for completing the Louvre from the beginning of the 17th century and forward are surveyed, and the evolution of the final design during the crucial years 1667-68 is analyzed in full detail. The text is supported throughout by a corpus of source documents and writings never before assembled in one place. Here, for the first time, all the known drawings for the Sun King's Louvre are published together, accompanied by a catalogue raisonné.
Peter Paul Rubens by
Universally celebrated for his rosy and concupiscent nudes, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was an artist whose first concern was sensuality in all its forms. This Baroque master devoted himself to a lifelong celebration of the joys and wonders of the physical realm. He felt that the human body was as lovely and natural as the many natural landscapes he painted as a young man. In a lushly illustrated text, Mar#65533;a Varshavskaya and Xenia Yegorova explore the master at work, bringing a unique focus to Ruben's life and work.
Peter Paul Rubens by
The eclectic art of which the Carracci family dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius. However, the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it a fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits, of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had illustrated the difficulties. He achieved it without losing anything of his overflowing personality, his questing imagination, and the enchanting discoveries of the greatest colourist known to painting. Rubens, the greatest master of Baroque painting's exuberance, took from the Italian Renaissance what could be of use to him, and then built upon it a style of his own. It is distinguished by a wonderful mastery of the human form and an amazing wealth of splendidly lighted colour. He was a man of much intellectual poise and was accustomed to court life, travelling from court to court, with pomp, as a trusted envoy. Rubens was one of those rare mortals who do real honour to humanity. He was handsome, good and generous, and he loved virtue. His laborious life was well ordered. The creator of so many delightful pagan feasts went each morning to mass before proceeding to his studio. He was the most illustrious type of happy and perfectly balanced genius, and combined in his personage passion and science, ardour and reflection. Rubens expressed drama as well as joy, since nothing human was foreign to him, and he could command at will the pathos of colour and expression which he required in his religious masterpieces. It might be said that he was as prolific in the representation of the joy and exuberance of life as Michelangelo was in the representation of passionate emotions.
Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael by
The variations of pleasure and their expression in Dutch rustic landscapes of the seventeenth century are recurring themes in Walter S. Gibson's engaging new book. Gibson focuses on Haarlem between 1600 and 1635, in his interpretation of Dutch landscapes and emphasizes prints, the medium in which the rustic view was first made available to the general art-buying public. Gibson begins by looking at the origins of the rustic landscape in the sixteenth-century Flanders and its later reformation by Dutch artists, a legacy very much alive today. He next offers a critical review of "scriptural reading," a popular mode of interpreting the Dutch rustic landscape that incorporates Calvinist-influenced moral allegories. Gibson then explores traditional ideas concerning recreation and suggests that the pleasure of rural landscapes, not preaching, constituted their chief appeal for seventeenth-century urban viewers. Using Visscher's Plaisante Plaetsen ("Pleasant Places") as a point of departure, Gibson examines the ways that townspeople, both the day-trippers and owners of country houses, experienced the Dutch countryside. He also discusses the role of staffage and suggests how the representations of peasants might have conditioned the responses of contemporary viewers to rural images. Finally, Gibson considers how scenes of the dilapidated farm buildings, dead trees, and other evidence of material decay may reflect traditional ideas rustic life as imagined by a townsperson. Or how they may represent another way for the artist to engage his urban audience: far removed from the idealized landscapes of a Giorgione, the rustic landscape of a Ruisdael conveys a countryside that was beginning to disappear under the relentless pressures of urbanization. Gibson's multilayered exploration of the rustic landscape enhances our understanding of the Golden Age in Dutch art. His richly illustrated book recalls a countryside now largely gone; at the same time, his evocative language gracefully articulates the role of the Dutch rustic landscape in the history of landscape painting.
Reflections on Baroque by
From its beginnings in the seventeenth century, the Baroque embraced the whole of Catholic Europe and infiltrated Protestant England, Orthodox Russia and even Muslim Turkey. Architecture, paintings, poetry, music, natural science and new forms of piety all have their places on the Baroque map. In this surprising reinterpretation of the Baroque, Robert Harbison offers new readings that stress its eccentric and tumultuous forms, in which a destablized sense of reality is often projected onto the viewer. This strange, subjectively inclined world is manifested in such bizarre phenomena as the small stuccoed universes of Giacomo Serpotta, the Sacred Mounts of Piedmont and the grimacing heads of F. X. Messerschmidt. Harbison explores the Baroque's metamorphoses into later styles, particularly the Rococo, and, in an unexpected twist, pursues the Baroque idea into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proposing provocative analyses of pastiches or imitations (in Der Rosenkavalier and the work of Aubrey Beardsley) or resemblances (deliberate or not) in Czech Cubism and Frank Gehry's architecture. Reflections on Baroque demonstrates that the Baroque impulse lives on in the twenty-first century imagination.
Rembrandt by
This interesting book about Rembrandt and his paintings was first written in 1905, and is just as enjoyable today. Featuring colour prints of 16 of his best paintings, this excellent introduction to one of the world's most famous painters is a g...
Rembrandt by
Rembrandt is indisputably the greatest artist of the seventeenth century, and many would say the greatest artist of all time. His mastery of composition, paint, and line--he was a superlative etcher--over a lifetime's work has rarely been emulated, let alone surpassed. At a time when other artists specialized, his themes covered history, pastoral and Biblical scenes, group paintings, and most celebrated of all, portraits. Although excruciately little is known about Rembrandt's personal thoughts and musings--he had no contemporary biographer and left no letters or diary--he did leave over 90 authenticated selfportraits, which offer the details of his outward appearance as he progressed from a young adult to an elderly man. For the majority of his life, Rembrandt enjoyed success and wealth as he catered to the artistic proclivities of the wealthy Dutch merchants in Amsterdam, but personal and financial tragedy dogged him as well. Forced to declare bankruptcy a decade before he died, he continued painting to pay the bills, creating some of his most noteworthy works of art in the process.
Rembrandt by
Rembrandt is completely mysterious in his spirit, his character, his life, his work and his method of painting. What we can divine of his essential nature comes through his painting and the trivial or tragic incidents of his unfortunate life; his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy. His misfortunes are not entirely explicable, and his oeuvre reflects disturbing notions and contradictory impulses emerging from the depths of his being, like the light and shade of his pictures. In spite of this, nothing perhaps in the history of art gives a more profound impression of unity than his paintings, composed though they are of such different elements, full of complex significations. One feels as if his intellect, that genial, great, free mind, bold and ignorant of all servitude and which led him to the loftiest meditations and the most sublime reveries, derived from the same source as his emotions. From this comes the tragic element he imprinted on everything he painted, irrespective of subject; there was inequality in his work as well as the sublime, which may be seen as the inevitable consequence of such a tumultuous existence. It seems as though this singular, strange, attractive and almost enigmatic personality was slow in developing, or at least in attaining its complete expansion. Rembrandt showed talent and an original vision of the world early, as evidenced in his youthful etchings and his first self-portraits of about 1630. In painting, however, he did not immediately find the method he needed to express the still incomprehensible things he had to say, that audacious, broad and personal method which we admire in the masterpieces of his maturity and old age. In spite of its subtlety, it was adjudged brutal in his day and certainly contributed to alienate his public.From the time of his beginnings and of his successes, however, lighting played a major part in his conception of painting and he made it the principal instrument of his investigations into the arcana of interior life. It already revealed to him the poetry of human physiognomy when he painted The Philosopher in Meditation or the Holy Family, so deliciously absorbed in its modest intimacy, or, for example, in The Angel Raphael leaving Tobias. Soon he asked for something more. The Night Watch marks at once the apotheosis of his reputation. He had a universal curiosity and he lived, meditated, dreamed and painted thrown back on himself. He thought of the great Venetians, borrowing their subjects and making of them an art out of the inner life of profound emotion. Mythological and religious subjects were treated as he treated his portraits. For all that he took from reality and even from the works of others, he transmuted it instantly into his own substance.
Rembrandt's House: Exploring the World of the Great Master by
No.4 Breestraat, Amsterdam, is an imposing 17th century house, but little different from many big old houses in the city. What makes it exceptional is that for twenty years one of the world's greatest artists lived here - Rembrandt van Rijn, master painter of the time. This is the story of that house, the world Rembrandt observed in and around it and the special universe he created in his studio there. In this unique and imaginative portrait, Anthony Bailey pieces together the events and circumstances which shaped Rembrandt's career - from his beginnings in Leiden and early apprenticeship to his marriage and personal relationships; his restless artistic energy, creative triumphs and, finally, his slow fall from fashion and descent into financial hardship, which forced him to sell his home.With as many levels and hidden corners as the house Bailey describes, this is at once biography, travel writing and history of a golden age.
Rembrandt's Passion Series by
Rembrandt's Passion Series is the name given to five paintings of similar size and format executed over a six year time-frame, 1633-39. The works were commissioned by Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, for his gallery at The Hague. Although each of the paintings depicts a traditional scene from the Passion of Christ, they do not form anything like a complete Passion Cycle. Seven years later, Hendrick ordered a further two works of the same size and format of subjects from the Nativity of Christ. Six of the seven paintings now hang in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. As the works were executed between Rembrandt's well-documented early Leiden period and his rapid rise to prominence as a portraitist in Amsterdam, the works have not attracted the scholarly attention they might, although the commission was undoubtedly the most prestigious of the young Rembrandt's career to date. Rembrandt's Passion Series is the first monograph to focus solely on this important group of paintings by the most famous artist of the Dutch Golden Age. In it, Simon McNamara traces the history of the commission by way of extant documentation, places the works in a seventeenth-century Dutch religious milieu, and shows how the series is both reflective of contemporary theological exegesis and embedded in theoretical artistic debates of the age. The book also highlights the extraordinary nature of the self-images seen in three of the paintings and discusses the legacy of the series in later graphic works by Rembrandt and in paintings by his pupils. In doing so, Rembrandt's Passion Series presents a series of unifying factors, both stylistically and thematically, for the works that allows the Passion Series to be properly, and finally, called a "series".
Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship by
From 1870 to 1935, the first true catalogues raisonnés of Rembrandt's paintings were produced, incorporating the results of individual connoisseurs' evaluations of authenticity and quality. This book, the first full-length study of this scholarly corpus, concentrates on the written connoisseurship of Wilhelm von Bode, Abraham Bredius, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, and Wilhelm Valentiner, whose articles and catalogues first shaped the modern conception of Rembrandt as a painter. In addition to analyzing their written work, Scallen addresses the social context of their connoisseurial practices, as shaped by their museum careers and their relationships with dealers and collectors.
The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-Century France by
A study of the reinvention of Rembrandt in 19th-century France.
A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture by
A Royal Passion is the first in-depth study of the Sun King as a patron of architecture. Surveying such monuments as the Louvre, Versailles, the Invalides, and other buildings that are closely identified with Louis XIV, Robert W. Berger demonstrates why these buildings, gardens, urban spaces, and their decorations were so important to him. Serving as functional necessities, objects of aesthetic delight, and as political statements, his architectural enterprises collectively underscored his absolutist authority. Moreover, by adopting the guise of 'builder-prince', Louis XIV reasserted his kinship with the Roman emperors, whose grandeur he sought both to emulate and to surpass.
Rubens by
The eclectic art of which the Carracci family dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius. However, the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it a fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits, of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had illustrated the difficulties. He achieved it without losing anything of his overflowing personality, his questing imagination, and the enchanting discoveries of the greatest colourist known to painting. Rubens, the greatest master of Baroque painting's exuberance, took from the Italian Renaissance what could be of use to him, and then built upon it a style of his own. It is distinguished by a wonderful mastery of the human form and an amazing wealth of splendidly lighted colour. He was a man of much intellectual poise and was accustomed to court life, travelling from court to court, with pomp, as a trusted envoy. Rubens was one of those rare mortals who do real honour to humanity. He was handsome, good and generous, and he loved virtue. His laborious life was well ordered. The creator of so many delightful pagan feasts went each morning to mass before proceeding to his studio. He was the most illustrious type of happy and perfectly balanced genius, and combined in his personage passion and science, ardour and reflection. Rubens expressed drama as well as joy, since nothing human was foreign to him, and he could command at will the pathos of colour and expression which he required in his religious masterpieces. It might be said that he was as prolific in the representation of the joy and exuberance of life as Michelangelo was in the representation of passionate emotions.
Rubens and Brueghel by
Truly collaborative paintings, that is, not simply mechanical but also conceptual co-productions, are rare in the history of art. This gorgeously illustrated catalogue explores just such an extraordinary partnership between Antwerp's most eminent painters of the early seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Rubens and Brueghel executed approximately twenty-five works together between around 1597 and Brueghel's death in 1625. Highly prized and sought after by collectors throughout Europe, the collaborative works of Rubens and Brueghel were distinguished by an extremely high level of quality, further enhanced by the status of the artists themselves. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held July 5 to September 24, 2006, the catalogue features twenty-six color plates of such Rubens/Brueghel paintings as The Return from War, The Feast of Acheloüs, and Madonna and Child in a Garland of Flowers, along with Rubens and Brueghel's collaborations with important contemporaries such as Frans Snyders and Hendrick van Balen. This is the first such publication to fully address and reproduce these works in depth.
The Signature Style of Frans Hals: Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity by
This richly illustrated study is the first consider the manifold functions and meanings of Hals's distinctive handling of paint. Atkins explores the uniqueness of Hals's approach to painting and the relationship of his manner to seventeenth-century aesthetics. He also investigates the economic motivations and advantages of his methods, the operation of the style as a personal and workshop brand, and the apparent modernity of the artist's style. The book seeks to understand the multiple levels on which Hals's consciously cultivated manner of painting operated for himself, his pupils and assistants, his clients, and succeeding generations of viewers. As a result, the book offers a wholly new understanding of one of the leading artists of the Dutch Golden Age, and one of the most formative painters in the history of art in the Western tradition. It also provides a much needed interrogation of the interrelationships of subjectivity, style, authorship, methods of artistic and commercial production, economic consumption, and art theory in early modernity.
A Study of Vermeer by
Edward Snow's A Study of Vermeer, first published in 1979 and here presented in an expanded and elaborately revised version, starts from a single premise: that we respond so intensely to Vermeer because his paintings reach so deeply into our lives. Our desire for images, the distances that separate us, the validations we seek from the still world, the traces of ghostliness in our own human presence--these, the book proposes, are Vermeer's themes, which he pursues with a realism always in touch with the uncanny. As Snow traces the many counterpoised sensations that make up Vermeer's equanimity, he leads us into a world of nuances and surprise. A Study of Vermeer is passionate and visual in its commitments. Snow works from the conviction that viewing pictures is a reciprocal act--symbiotic, consequential, real. His discussions of Vermeer's paintings are conducted in a language of patient observation, and they involve the reader in an experience of deepening relation and ongoing visual discovery. The book has been designed to facilitate this process: over eighty illustrations, fifty-nine in color (including two full-page foldouts), accompany the text so that the details Snow illuminates will be continally in view. Here is a book to enthrall not only students of Vermeer, but anyone who feels the exhilaration of what Cézanne called "thinking in images."
Van Dyck by
From the time he set up his first studio at the tender age of sixteen, Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was a legend in the art world. Rubens, whom he studied with as a child, said that he was his most talented pupil, and he went on to spectacularly fulfill this promise with a career as a celebrated court painter in England and Spain. Historians, scholars, and art lovers alike continue to recognize the sophistication and timeless beauty of his works. In this fascinating compendium of Van Dyck's decades-long career, Natalia Gritsai highlights the best of the artist's many masterpieces.
Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums by
Vermeer's Wager stands at the intersection of art history and criticism, philosophy and museology. Using a familiar and celebrated painting by Johannes Vermeer as a case study, Ivan Gaskell explores what it might mean to know and use a work of art. He argues that art history as generally practiced, while successfully asserting certain claims to knowledge, fails to take into account aspects of the unique character of works of art. Our relationship to art is mediated, not only through reproduction - particularly photography - but also through displays in museums. In an analysis that ranges from seventeenth-century Holland, through mid-nineteenth-century France, to artists' and curators' practice today, Gaskell draws on his experience of Dutch art history, philosophy and contemporary art criticism. Anyone with an interest in Vermeer and the afterlife of his art will value this book, as will all who think seriously about the role of photography in perception and the core purposes of art museums.
Vermeer and the Delft School by
"Seventeenth-century Delft has often been viewed as a quaint town whose artists painted scenes of domestic life. This book revises that image, showing that the small but vibrant Dutch city produced a wide range of artworks, including luxurious tapestries and silver objects, as well as sophisticated paintings for the court at The Hague and for patrician collectors in Delft itself."--BOOK JACKET.
Versailles: Absolutism and Harmony by 
Versailles: Landscape of Power and Pleasure by 
The Visible and the Invisible: On Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting by
The book addresses the debates on Rembrandt, Metsu, Vermeer, and Hoogstraten that are currently taking place in art history and cultural studies. These focus mainly on the representation of gender difference, the relationship between text and image, and the emotional discourse. They are also an appeal for art history as a form of cultural studies that analyses the semantic potential of art within discursive and social contemporary practices.
