Art history from Holland
21 drawings with Rembrandt’s signature of which his authorship is accepted
3 drawings with signatures that might be authentic but the drawing itself not by the hand of the master
2 etchings reworked by hand and signed by Rembrandt
For an explanation of the nature of this list, see Schwartzlist 301.
Continue reading “301 1 Core list of Rembrandt drawings:
signed drawings”
Since 1991, the opinion has held sway that only 70 drawings by Rembrandt can be confirmed with great certainty. That is, drawings that are signed, otherwise inscribed in Rembrandt’s hand, indented for transfer to the etching plate or serving as preparatory studies for an autograph painting or etching. Schwartz now expands that list from 70 to 169.
The first exhibition on the Arabian peninsula of original work by Rembrandt took place in Muscat, Oman, from 19 August to 19 September 2009. Schwartz made a brief film on Rembrandt and Amsterdam to introduce the master to the Omanis. He attended the opening and the first week of the show. His impressions.
The recently closed exhibition Images of Erasmus at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam rightly introduced Hieronymus Bosch into Erasmus’s sphere. Schwartz reveals unsuspected truths – well, at least possible truths – about the two of them.
A country art auction in England made the front pages all over the world when 2.2 million pounds was paid for a painting that looks a lot like a Rembrandt self-portrait. Is it? Schwartz thinks it is, and supplies an analysis to explain why. At the same time, he shows how the published opinions of the Rembrandt Research Project could have led to the rejection of the painting by the experts consulted by the owner and the auction house. More like an article than a column.
The emergence of 32 works said to be unknown Jackson Pollocks, a generation after the death of the artist, had an uncannily similar precedent in the Wacker Affair, involving 33 paintings put on the market in the late 1920s as van Goghs. If art history indeed repeats itself, the Pollocks will turn out to be deliberate forgeries.
Two independent Dutch art historians, Michiel Roscam Abbing and Roelof van Straten, have made optimal use of the Rembrandt year to bring out some basic books on the artist as well as more popular writings. A tribute.
The idea that Rembrandt was sympathetic to Jews and Judaism is so generally accepted that it is seldom questioned critically. One of the pillars of this supposition is the identification of many portrait sitters and models as Jews. Hardly any of these can however stand up to scrutiny.
A friend of Rembrandt’s wrote four poems on The hundred-guilder print. Only two of them, sweet thoughts on the goodness of Christ, are cited in the literature. The third one, a concise statement of classical Christian anti-Judaism, has been repressed in the Rembrandt literature. Schwartz insists that we acknowledge that Rembrandt shared the same attitudes toward the Jews of all his contemporaries and that he was not sympathetic to Judaism. Continue reading “252 The third poem”
The Rembrandt Year 2006 is upon us. At work on a new book on Rembrandt, Schwartz reminisces about the book he edited for the Rembrandt Year 1969. As a publishing project, Horst Gerson’s Rembrandt paintings was a great success. Such successes do not come out of the blue. Schwartz pays tribute to the man who conceived and sold the project, Willem Bloemena.
Continue reading “235 Willem Bloemena’s Great Rembrandt Book”