Rembrandt Quotes - page 4
In The Night Watch, again in Amsterdam, we have the feeling of communication: that something dramatic is happening before our very eyes. This scene of a company of guards painted as a group portrait was very popular in Rembrandt's day. The only other Dutch painter who could do anything at all with the subject was Frans Hals, who did it several times and rather well. But the conventions prevailing at the time were for such a group portrait to consist of an inert line of figures which was boring in the extreme. Rembrandt, tackling this subject, sees it as a dramatic event but also as an entirely realistic everyday occurrence... It was probably the most ambitious painting in size and scope that Rembrandt had painted up to that time, but it began his downfall among his contemporaries and from then his popularity waned. As his painting got better and better, he got poorer and poorer - so much for the Dutch public of his day and their taste in art! p. 404.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt was already deeply involved in his attachment to Rubens - at once adopting him as his model and fighting to have the differences noticed. His [painting] 'Descent from the Cross', also painted in 1631 for the Stadholder, was directly taken from the engraving after Rubens's greatest masterpiece in Antwerp Cathedral', while at the same time being a calculated Protestant response to the immense diapason of the [catholic] Flemish master's altar-piece.
Rembrandt
The picture of Jan Six, painted in 1654 is, then, a virtual encyclopedia of painting, from the loosest handling to the dry brush, sparely loaded with yellow, dragged over the surface at the edge of Six's right cuff; from the finest detail to the most impressionist daring. Yet Rembrandt manages to bring all this diversity of technique into a totally resolved single image. So that Jan Six does indeed stand before us much as we would dearly wish to imagine ourselves, all the contradictions of our character-vanity and modesty, outward show and inward reflectiveness, energy and calm-miraculously fitted together.
Rembrandt
Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt's has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt is the most transparent artist I know. What he proclaimed as his credo, the commentaries of his contemporaries and what we find in the drawings all add up to one obsessively truthful, artist. One who proclaimed that he drew from nature (life) and 'anything else (invention) was worthless in his eyes'. He could not have been clearer, yet because this credo directly contradicts the apparent credo of our times: the more an artist differs from nature the more 'creative' that artist is, Rembrandt's true gift to us has been excised.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt was on a continuous journey of discovery; not on a production line of consistent art objects for the market-place, as the scholars hope to recreate him. His wide ranging methods and interests produced very wide ranging quality. He did not tidy away his less successful works, nor should the scholars do so. He has left us the fullest record of his explorations of any artist and naturally his work includes many comparative failures. But astonishingly, even some of his greatest drawings have been mis-attributed to minor students.
Rembrandt
