For whatever bad reason this has happened, the long-awaited catalogue of Rembrandt’s drawings by Peter Schatborn, former head of the department of prints and drawings of the Rijksmuseum, has been published without a concordance in which one can look up the drawings by their Benesch numbers. Those are the numbers that have been used universally since the appearance in 1954-57 of the catalogue by Otto Benesch, edited by his wife Eva Benesch, In 1974, after the death of Otto, Eva brought out a revised edition. Both were published by Phaidon Press. Peter Schatborn’s catalogue came out in 2019 in a volume that also contains Rembrandt’s etchings: Peter Schatborn and Erik Hinterding, Rembrandt: the complete etchings and drawings, Cologne (Taschen) 2019.
Because I found Schatborn’s catalogue unacceptably irritating to use without a concordance – for which reason I have not been using it at all – I have made a concordance, which I make available to all.
Thank you, Gary, for this Christmas Day gift! I also made a concordance on the basis of the initial list Peter drew up about 8 years ago, which he kindly send me. It’s on Excel and so you can sort it by Benesch or Schatborn numbers, as well as by medium or location. I also included any discussion of each drawing in the main text of the book, with page-references. But I am embarassed to post it online because it’s a hash of English and Dutch. On the other hand, it means you don’t have to use the unwieldy book or, in my case, travel with it when I move between the Mediterranean and the UK. If anyone would like it mailed to them, I am happy to provide it via the contact tab on http://www.rembrandtcatalogue.net. Gary, I’ll send you a copy. A few other Rembrandt buffs already have it.
Very Happy New Year to you and Loekie,
Martin
I could have known that we were duplicating each other’s efforts. We don’t see each other often enough.
I drafted the concordance in a Word table, of which I have also saved a version in Excel. But I couldn’t make use of Excel safely because both Benesch and Schatborn make use of A, a, v, r and an additional alphabet soup of numbers. The risk of botching things up was too great. It took a lot of work to get the concordance into respectable graphic shape – as much time, actually, as drafting it – and when it was done, I wanted to fix it in a pdf that wouldn’t go off changing shape or shifting cells on its own. Also, I wanted the product to look like it was my work and not a rip-off of Taschen property. So there.
With thanks and returns of the day and year to come to you and Marina,
Gary