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Rembrandt's Eyes

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This is a brilliant, beautiful piece of work by Mr. Schama. As mentioned elsewhere, it is really a dual biography of Rubens and Rembrandt. But it is much more than that. It is also an in depth portrait of 17th century Holland, politically and socially. The book holds your interest because it constantly shifts gears from talking about Rubens/Rembrandt to telling you what was going on in Antwerp and Amsterdam at the time and then you get to see the wonderful pictures and to read Mr. Schama's sparkling commentaries. I have read almost all of Mr. Schama's books and have always admired his writing style. This is not a dry, academic treatise. All of the characters come to life as they do in the best novels. Unless you are an expert on Rembrandt I also think you will be surprised at some of the paintings, drawings and etchings that are reproduced in this book. I am an art lover but have mainly read up on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. I didn't know much about Rembrandt other than remembering that he did a lot of self-portraits and that he was very big on chiaroscuro. I thought in terms of there being a sameness to the style in his works but after reading this book you will see how much his art changed throughout his life. There are a few landscapes that have a Romantic- almost Caspar David Friedrich- look to them. Especially in the later work with the rough handling of the paint you can see an influence on Cezanne and Van Gogh. My only complaint about the book, and it is a very minor complaint, is that maybe 3 or 4 of the reproductions are too small to see some of the details that the author is describing. But this is a wonderful book. I am only sorry that now that I have finished it I will have to wait 5 years or so to see what Mr. Schama comes up with next!

Rembrandt left behind more self-portraits than any artist before or since. With his new book Rembrandt's Eyes, historian Simon Schama has added a new portrait of the artist, this one in meticulously and exhaustively researched, rhapsodically written prose.

Schama's heavy tome makes every attempt to be a definitive work on the painter, and it succeeds. First and foremost it is a narrative of the life and work of Rembrandt van Rijn, although calling it a "biography" somehow sounds reductive. It is equal parts analysis of Rembrandt's painting, documentation of his life, and history of seventeenth century Holland, so sections of the book can be read with profit by anyone studying the artist, his art, or the social history of the times.

The Rembrandt of Schama's book is a complex man, with hubris, greed and an enormous talent for portraiture. Early on he takes the monumentally cocky step of signing only his first name -- no "van Rijn" -- as if he knew his paintings would be studied for centuries to come. His understanding of humans and their personae was without parallel, Schama writes. "No painter would ever understand the theatricality of social life as well as Rembrandt. He saw the actors in men and the men in actors."

As his title suggests, Schama finds special messages in the eyes of Rembrandt's subjects. He notes that in art education painters were taught to put special care into their depiction of the whites of eyes, yet in many of Rembrandt's works -- Schama points to "The Artist in his Studio" (1629) -- the eyes are dull, dark pits. "When Rembrandt made eyes," Schama says, "he did so purposefully," and so in Rembrandt's Eyes he continually returns to the haunting eyes the painter painted.

Most of all, Schama's book is a meditative, entranced attempt to get behind the faces we see in Rembrandt's self-portraits. Schama reads Rembrandt's self-portraits in various costumes -- as a merchant, as a soldier, for example -- as indications of his elusiveness, as if each portrait were meant to conceal rather than reveal its subject. In analysis of one self-portrait, Schama writes that the painter "has disappeared inside his persona," inscrutable beyond the dead dark eyes of the painting. The artist's disguise hides his true self, and the critic is left to speculate. It seems that in this case Schama is grasping (as art historians must) at facts and attitudes that can never be certainly known, constructing and imputing elaborate guesses that fail precisely because the painter has succeeded.

Schama's reverence for Rembrandt and art in general winds up being both a virtue and a vice. The book begins with an epigraph from Paul Valery: "We should apologize for daring to speak about painting." It is difficult to imagine a guide through this world who is more well-versed and in love with his subject. But do we really want our biographers to be respectful to the point of silence? Nobody wants to learn about the masters from a guide who finds them too sublime to defile with comment. Granted, a hefty book like this is hardly "silence," but Schama's hushed tones do get distracting.

This book has the virtue of being as close to exhaustive about its subject as one could hope. There is little psychological interpretation that Schama leaves undone, and little consequential biographical detail that he leaves unmentioned. Rembrandt's Eyes, a mammoth book that takes on with grace the equally mammoth task of explaining what is behind the brooding eyes of Rembrandt's portraits, will be a definitive work on the painter and his work.

Nobody writes more evocatively or enthusiastically about 17th-century Holland as Simon Schama. His 1987 masterpiece of interpretive social history, The Embarrassment of Riches, brought that age throbbingly to life. Throughout this hefty tome Schama is, as the title suggests, desperately keen to see through Rembrandt's eyes. He achieves, with a verbal abundance and an appreciative delight of textures, the world Rembrandt's paintings so lucidly evoke. The chapter entitled Amsterdam Anatomised which describes the port-city, in probably the most eventful era in the entire history of art, the Dutch Golden Age, is itself worth the price of admission.Rembrandt himself steps on centre-stage only on page 202. Schama devotes the first 200 pages to Peter Paul Reubens the Flemish painter ( this could easily have been an entire book on its own! ) as Schama contends, convincingly, that it is impossible to understand Rembrandt unless we understand his desire to emulate Reubens. Why does Rembrandt matter? To Schama and to us? Because, as Schama affirms, Rembrandt is the greatest painter of the human experience ever to have lived - "Which is why he will always speak across the centuries to those for whom art might be something other than the quest for ideal forms; to the unnumbered legions of damaged humanity who recognise, instinctively and with gratitude, Rembrandt's vision of our fallen race, with all its flaws and infirmities squarely on view, as a proper subject for picturing, and, more important, as worthy of love, of saving grace." Eschewing the arid dogmas of academia that infect and stultify art biographies, Schama celebrates all his emotions and beliefs about Rembrandt in this overlong and memorable book. It should be essential reading for anyone who has ever set eyes upon a work by Rembrandt. Take a bow, Simon Schama.

"Rembrandt's Eyes" contains such evocative detail and historical sweep as to suggest an excellent script for a possible movie of the Dutch Master. Simon Schama doesn't just describe a painting or a scene from 17th century Holland, he puts your senses in high gear with a cornucopia of images, insights and appreciation for Rembrandt and the world he lived in.

This book is not a volume of color plates with tersely rendered explanations. It's a dense and textured treatment of one of the pinnacles of the Rennaissance: Rembrandt van Rijn. But how, exactly, did he get to be so universally famous? Schama pieces together the artist's earliest influence - the mega-star Rubens - and the effects of the Calvinist/Catholic conflicts on Dutch society. You will never look at the strangely mournful, pensive face of Rembrandt in the same way after reading "Rembrandt's Eyes".

The book itself is excellently created, with over 700 pages of glossy paper drenched in intelligently set text. The illustrations, while too small in some cases, are well placed to support Schama's descriptions, and the book has a heft that more than justifies the price. This is a book to read with relish.

In a time when readers are inundated with books that are brilliant pieces of, "gifted compression", which are as trite as they are brief, and when many books are masquerading as bad screenplays of movies we have already seen. A marvel the likes of, "Rembrandt's Eyes", penned by Mr. Schama arrives as a worthy descendent of Guttenberg's Press.

This book lacks two traits that generally have kept me away from this type of work; it lacks pretense, and affectation. If you love art and history this Author provides both, and together with his eloquent prose he does well by Rembrandt with hundreds of glossy illustrations that are stunning.

The explanations of specific pieces are detailed and as lengthy as they need to be. Any attempt to abbreviate what Rembrandt put in to his works, whether major or minor, would be foolish, futile, and a disservice, both to the Artist and the reader.

A full two-page spread of "The Nightwatch" will take your breath away. This image will do so in part by what the Author relates about the work, the history leading up to it, the people portrayed, Rembrandt's methods, and then you turn the page and find a work that can only be described in superlatives.

The Author has a talent for the theatrical. He brings you along with delightful, readable prose, he educates, and then he pulls aside the curtain to see your reward.

And this is not only Rembrandt, but also Rubens, this is a 17th century book of History. As the word renaissance may be applied to an individual of varied talents, the word equally applies to this effort.

The construction, and quality lavished on the book itself, is rapidly becoming extinct with the books found at the local superstore. Decades from now this volume will still be readable and intact, long after books of lesser construction and content are browning into obscurity.

700 pages sounds like a lengthy read. Drop this book on your foot and you will read the rest with your foot in a cast. But the latter may not be as bad as it sounds as the more time you spend with this work, the more delighted you will be.

I could not recommend this book more highly, simply brilliant!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Rembrandt's Eyes. For me, there are certain books which convey me (as if on a magic carpet) to worlds I could not othgerwise experience. The novels of Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac, and Joyce, for example. For years, I have wondered about the face in the series of self-portraits painted by Rembrandt. Those eyes, especially the eyes. Many have found fault with this book, questioning its reliability as a biography, as a cultural history, as an analysis of one of the world's greatest painters. I am unqualified to address those criticisms. But I can share with others my sense of delight and wonder as I experienced (albeit vicariously) the world which Rembrandt portrayed and in which he lived. Is that portrayal wholly accurate? I have no idea. With exceptional skill, Schama has transported me back in time...through Rembrandt's paintings...to a world, indeed a universe, I could not otherwise visit. During that journey, my soul as well as my mind was nourished...and my eyes now see with even greater wonder and delight the world in which I live.

This is the best book on the arts that I've seen in years. Simon Schama can really tell a story, for one thing. More importantly, his interpretations of individual paintings are frequently dazzling, sometimes going for as much as a dozen pages or so. He usually begins by bringing historical background to bear on his explanation of a painting, and ultimately he always discusses the painting's composition, brushwork, etc. I find myself looking again at the paintings (in the excellent reproductions) and seeing more and more things. Some reviewers (in journals) have complained that Schama makes too much of Rubens' supposed influence on Rembrandt, and that the he spends a couple of hundred pages on the Flemish painter. But since Rubens is also one of the greatest painters ever (though very different from Rembrandt), and since Schama is as good on Rubens as he is on Rembrandt, what's to complain about? It's just a great book.

Simon Schama's REMBRANDT'S EYES is undoubtedly one of the authoritative works on Rembrandt's life and paintings. Schama vividly depicts the unparalled and tortured genius of Rembrandt, a man who was brilliant in success and even more so during tragedy. To understand Rembrandt's paintings is to understand the man behind each brushstroke: strong-willed, prideful, and uncompromising in his art. Schama conveys the essence of Rembrandt with such force and effectiveness that we cannot help but appreciate Rembrandt's tragic life and artistic genius.

REMBRANDT'S EYES contains beautiful illustrations of all of Rembrandt's major works; the analysis of each is detailed, clear, and interesting. Through the course of the book, you will be fascinated by Rembrandt's self-portraits and the level of understanding with which he painted himself. Perhaps no other artist has given us such a powerful autobiography without the use of a single written word. This deep understanding of the human soul is evident in all of his works. Schama explains Rembrandt's paintings and his techniques in a comprehensive and powerful manner. If you are interested at all in the truly unique and fascinating genius of Rembrandt, REMBRANDT'S EYES is a must.

I would highly recommend REMBRANDT'S EYES to any person interested in art history, Dutch painting, or just Rembrandt. This book also serves as a powerful autobiography of a man with a very interesting story. Be forewarned though: this book is very long, and putting it down may be hard.

One of the pleasures of reading books from your own library is that they are always there for return visits. Reading Hockney's 'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters' stimulated this reader to probe more deeply into some of the venerated painters. Simon Schama's fine book REMBRANDT'S EYES is like an old friend, an excellent resource book for facts about Netherlands painting, social and political history that so affected the works of the two featured painters Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, a page-turner novel, and a catalogue of brilliant reproductions of paintings. This book satisfies - even more the second time around!

A hefty book at over 750 pages, there is not a page that Schama does not use his charming style of writing to slowly inform. We learn about the atmosphere into which Rembrandt was born, follow his works from the earliest examples through his entire career, encounter his passion for elegance and his fall into poverty, and understand his envy of the creatively and socially successful Rubens. Not a book of gossip, this, but instead a biography well documented in a fine bibliography (no mean feat for a history of a great man without much written contemporary documentation!) and a survey of illustrations that augment the story as well as any yet written.

For those who hunger for knowledge about a famous painter yet who deign to wade through the usual dry treatise format, welcome to the class with Schama. This is a book that will endure (first printed in 1999 and now available in paperback) because of the stature of the subject AND the stature of the author. Hats off to Simon Schama who so entertainingly and successfully takes us behind Rembrandt's eyes to see his work as few have shown it. Grady Harp, December 06

Reading,or even browsing,this huge achievement simply overwhelms. Now it's obvious that all old masters books are immortal (especially if they have pictures) since the works have already passed the time test. But Mr. Schama's REMBRANDT's EYES must surpass just about every old master book in every way. It's one of those works that makes you glad we live in a society that can mass produce this kind of thing!!If you're an expert (which I am definitely not),I'll bet you'll totally agree with me. If you're a skeptic,or even a beer guzzling barhopper,you should still buy this book. Browse,read the author's insights,and be enthralled that a fellow like Rembrandt existed 350 years ago. For he is like Shakespeare,a monumental genius,born about 40 years after the Bard.But as a painter, he is a heck of a lot more accessible.His art is universal,no translations required,and no Cliff Notes either! Accompanied by beautiful photos,and brilliant commentary on many of his great works, you can buy this now,and know it will give you pleasure at the amazing creativity of a universal genius,even in old age! BTW, the artist's self portraits are only many of the wonders here,and they do show him in his older years.