From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Rembrandt is widely considered one of the most important painters in European art history, and this large, lavishly illustrated volume reinforces that image without skirting controversy (including debates over some of his works' authenticity). Dutch art scholar and columnist Schwartz is clearly an expert on the artist, encapsulating his style in sharp bursts of insight: "Human weakness and-especially-human strength inspired him. He found it not only in heroic action but also in resignation and introspection." But the author doesn't shy from paintings considered less successful, such as the so-called "Leiden history painting," "full of portentous details that do not correspond sufficiently to any known iconography." In contextualizing these works, Schwartz is careful to explain Rembrandt's beliefs, worldview and inspiration: "The text of the Bible was however only one of the givens...along with non-biblical literary sources; models in older art...antiquarian research; knowledge of folkways...and his own imagination." It's this complete view that makes the book so insightful, but it's the personal details that will gain readers' trust: "Few artists' biographers had anything nice to say about him as a person." This detailed, down-to-earth character sketching, combined with solid biographic and historical information, that makes this book as intellectually substantial as it is gorgeous. 700 full-color illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The great Dutch painter Rembrandt is not an artist whose life and work can be satisfactorily encompassed in a single volume, but Schwartz makes a heroic attempt. An American-trained art historian who has spent most of his life in the Netherlands, Schwartz offers accessible prose and solid scholarship in this maximalist survey of the artist's dazzling and occasionally scandalous career. Highlights include Rembrandt's sketchy training; his unparalleled craft (including his gift for color and his genius at capturing the subtlest of facial expressions in his portraits); his relationships with family, friends, lovers, and patrons; and the money woes that in later years led him to declare bankruptcy. The book is most valuable for its 700 color illustrations, many of which are so exactingly reproduced that you can see the very pores on the noses of the portraits' subjects. This is the next best thing to seeing the paintings in the flesh. Nance, Kevin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
