Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated introduction to the life and work of the exceptional Dutch painter. Rembrandt van Rijn and the Netherlands grew up together. The artist, born in Leiden in 1606, lived during the tumultuous period of the Dutch Revolt and the establishment of the independent Dutch Republic. He later moved to Amsterdam, a cosmopolitan center of world trade, and became the city’s most fashionable portraitist. His attempts to establish himself with the powerful court at The Hague failed, however, and the final decade of his life was marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Rembrandt’s Holland considers the life and work of this celebrated painter anew, as it charts his career alongside the visual culture of urban Amsterdam and the new Dutch Republic. In the book, Larry Silver brings to light Rembrandt’s problematic relationship with the ruling court at The Hague and reexamines how his art developed from large-scale, detailed religious imagery to more personal drawings and etchings, moving self-portraits, and heartfelt close-ups of saintly figures. Ultimately, this readable biography shows how both Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age ripened together. Featuring up-to-date scholarship and in-depth analysis of Rembrandt’s major works, and illustrated beautifully throughout, it is essential reading for art students and anyone who enjoys the work of the Dutch Masters.

This engagingly written study presents a rich picture of a dynamic society that had torn itself away from the mediocrity of its past--a stagnant nation of peasants and fishermen--to pursue an overseas empire that led to great financial wealth and a highly sophisticated cultivation of the arts. This classic work first appeared in English translation in 1963.

Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated introduction to the life and work of the exceptional Dutch painter. Rembrandt van Rijn and the Netherlands grew up together. The artist, born in Leiden in 1606, lived during the tumultuous period of the Dutch Revolt and the establishment of the independent Dutch Republic. He later moved to Amsterdam, a cosmopolitan center of world trade, and became the city’s most fashionable portraitist. His attempts to establish himself with the powerful court at The Hague failed, however, and the final decade of his life was marked by personal tragedy and financial hardship. Rembrandt’s Holland considers the life and work of this celebrated painter anew, as it charts his career alongside the visual culture of urban Amsterdam and the new Dutch Republic. In the book, Larry Silver brings to light Rembrandt’s problematic relationship with the ruling court at The Hague and reexamines how his art developed from large-scale, detailed religious imagery to more personal drawings and etchings, moving self-portraits, and heartfelt close-ups of saintly figures. Ultimately, this readable biography shows how both Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age ripened together. Featuring up-to-date scholarship and in-depth analysis of Rembrandt’s major works, and illustrated beautifully throughout, it is essential reading for art students and anyone who enjoys the work of the Dutch Masters.

There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries. Rembrandt's Jews puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam—which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood—Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented—far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now—a trip that, under ever-threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.

"An art historical study of Rembrandt's use of religious imagery, arranged by subject matter. Demonstrates the new ideas the artist brought to his interpretations of the Jerusalem Temple and the apostolate church, as he explored the relationship between Jewish and Christian revelation in biblical history"--Provided by publisher.

Essays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today.

For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.

This book sheds light on the fascinating ways Rembrandt and other Golden Age painters were influenced by Eastern culture. In the 17th century, Amsterdam was a vibrant hub of the burgeoning European trade with Asia, Africa, and the Levant, importing copious amounts of foreign items that powerfully stimulated the imagination of numerous Dutch artists. This was notably the case with Rembrandt, whose curiosity and voraciousness as a collector were legendary in his time. Throughout his prolific career, he drew on Eastern influences in genres as diverse as history painting and portraiture, including depictions in which he himself adopted Oriental styled attire. This lavishly illustrated book explores the inventive ways in which Rembrandt and his contemporaries accommodated Eastern imagery into their own repertoire, set within the wider context of Holland's rapidly expanding commercial and cultural exchange with its non-European trading partners. The problematic term "Orient" was widely used in Rembrandt's time and will be discussed at great length in this catalogue.

"In 1634 the up-and-coming painting talent Rembrandt van Rijn wed the love of this life in Friesland: Saskia Uylenburgh, the daughter of a councillor at the Court of Friesland. The story of their marriage is also that of seventeenth-century marriages in general, from courtship to drawing up a will. How did such a stylish wedding come about, and how did life proceed afterwards, when love and suffering were shared? Using evocative paintings, etchings, documents and precious wedding gifts, this book shows us the world of Friesland's most famous bride and groom ever--and that marriage vows back then actually appear to differ little from those of today."--from back cover