Schwartz muses on the Dutch research libraries he loves to visit, reminiscing about the past and worrying about the future.
Memoirs and tributes
365 Life as we know it
For seventy years, Schwartz has been aware that he, with the rest of humanity, is in grave danger of being wiped out. He takes account of the record and reveals his solution to the most immediate threat.
363 Saenredam and Huygens; Rubens and Rembrandt
“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”
My reflection in Clio’s mirror
Schwartz looks back on his beginnings as an art historian. Grad student blues and release through new loves.
362 Work for a grown man
Mutual relations among Rembrandt specialists are not always as cordial as they might be. It takes understanding and diplomacy to stay on good terms with everyone in the field. In that I have not been universally successful. One colleague with whom I have always got on well, differences not aside but included, is Christopher Brown. This is more to his credit than to mine. But I admire him for much more than that. Continue reading “362 Work for a grown man”
360 Kitaj lets it all hang out
A German art critic-editor and a German publisher have brought out one of the main ego documents of twentieth-century art in England and the US. Schwartz’s personal comments on and associations evoked by R.B. Kitaj’s outrageous Confessions of an old Jewish painter.
Continue reading “360 Kitaj lets it all hang out”
355 Embassy of the Free Mind
What could be a greater honor than to be appointed Ambassador of the Free Mind? That title was bestowed on Schwartz by unrivalled champions of the free mind, the Ritman family of Amsterdam.
354 How I became a Rembrandt scholar
To mark Rembrandt’s upcoming birthday, Schwartz reminisces about his beginnings in Rembrandt studies half a century ago.
353 Back to/from Poland
With a family history in Poland and the encumbrance of the Holocaust, Schwartz cannot visit that country like a casual tourist. A professional congress brought him to Warsaw for four days, where his ignorance of his antecedents came back to oppress him. Personal, scholarly and professional feelings become crossed and confused.
Continue reading “353 Back to/from Poland”
The Barberini and Orange inventories: a comparison of the collections and their publication
During the same years in the middle of the first half of the seventeenth century, important collections of paintings were amassed by the stadholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Frederik Hendrik, prince of Orange (1584-1647), and Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679), the nephew of Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII. The inventories of their collections were drawn up in 1632 and 1625, respectively, offering a good basis for comparison. The article deals not only with the collections, the inventories and their publication in the twentieth century, but also with the structure of the patronage networks deployed by pope and stadholder.
The article was published in honor of Marilyn Lavin, in a festschrift offered by her friends.
Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque: a cat’s cradle for Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ed. David A. Levine and Jack Freiberg, New York (Italica Press) 2010, pp. 167-178.
Download pdf (280 kB)