Art history from Holland
“Saenredam, Huygens and the Utrecht bull” was Gary Schwartz’s first publication as an art historian. He looks back on how it came into being and what it meant in his life. Schwartz would like to think of the Dutch- and Flemish-speaking low countries as one culture, but circumstances keep intruding on this ideal image. Circumstances such as the lives and posterities of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn.
Continue reading “363 Saenredam and Huygens; Rubens and Rembrandt”
The 2018 volume of The Low Countries, an outstanding yearbook to which I have been contributing for twenty years, is the last to appear in print. From now on it will be brought out online only. The yearbook starts out with 100 pages of contributions from CODART members, in recognition of CODART’s twentieth anniversary. Mine juxtaposes the very limited cross-border experiences of the two giants of seventeenth-century art in the Low Countries and tells about the one time, two hundred years later, when they were briefly conjoined as equals in each other’s countries.
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Cultural pessimists who are sure of the ongoing decline in our appreciation for art will have no choice, after reading Schwartzlist 321, but to change their tune if not their mind. Continue reading “321 Rembrandt, Rubens, the Beau Sancy and the Jew”