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Rembrandt's Eyes
The great 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn left us so many arresting self-portraits, painted at every stage in his eventful life, that his distinctive face and bearing are a familiar part of the 20th-century cultural landscape, a recognizable presence in galleries across Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the artist himself remains an enigma. Rembrandt was a notoriously difficult man and an inveterate risk taker in life and art: his aspirations to a grandiose Amsterdam lifestyle in the heyday of his popularity as a painter of portraits and large-scale historical works bankrupted him, and he died in relative poverty. His personal effects and treasured collection of paintings and natural rarities were sold off and dispersed, leaving the historian with a tantalizingly scant body of fragmentary records around which to build a convincing biography.
In Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama - the leading historical craftsman of our era, with a career-long commitment to Dutch history - succeeds with consummate skill in bringing the heroic painter of such masterpieces as The Night Watch and Portrait of Jan Six vividly to life. Returning to the bustling Dutch world with which he first made his reputation in the bestselling Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Schama re-creates Rembrandt's life and times with all the verve and panache of a historical novelist--while never for an instant losing his scrupulous grip on recorded fact and detail. The telling surviving fragments of archival information about Rembrandt's personal and professional history are skillfully embedded in a rich, dense tapestry of the commercial whirl and political hurly-burly of the 17th-century Low Countries--a divided territory, split between the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the contested powers of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Dutch Republic--with the tentacles of the tale reaching into the most unexpected shadowy corners of European love and war, aspiration and intrigue.
Rembrandt's Eyes is, in fact, two biographies for the price of one. From the outset, Schama contrasts the life of Rembrandt with that of his older, equally talented countryman Peter Paul Rubens, whose meteoric rise and sustained success as a society painter forms a revealing contrast with Rembrandt's unhappier relationship with fame and fortune. The comparison is a telling one. Where Rubens furnishes the wealthy and powerful with glorious reflections of, and visual foils for, their social and political aspirations and glory, Rembrandt can never resist testing the envelope of taste and stylistic acceptability. His challenge to his clients to embrace the shock of his painterly experiments with technique, texture, and composition ultimately produced his downfall. The Amsterdam town council took down his The Oath-swearing of Claudius Civilis, rolled it up, and returned his masterpiece to him to be cut down in an attempt to sell it to a suitable buyer.
This is a gorgeous book to own, too. Rembrandt's Eyes is printed on heavy, high-gloss paper and lavishly illustrated throughout in full color. The double-page color spreads of the most memorable of Rembrandt's works will take readers' breath away. But above all, this is narrative history at its very best, a page-turner and an adventure story that will make the reader laugh and cry by turns in the time-honored tradition of masterly writing. --Lisa Jardine
768 pages, Hardcover
First published November 16, 1999
72 people are currently reading
4619 people want to read
About the author
Simon Schama
80 books1,029 followersSir Simon Michael Schama is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.
Schama first came to public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. He is also known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain (2000—2002), as well as other documentary series such as The American Future: A History (2008) and The Story of the Jews (2013).
Schama was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Schama first came to public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. He is also known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain (2000—2002), as well as other documentary series such as The American Future: A History (2008) and The Story of the Jews (2013).
Schama was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
June 10, 2018
I hate Simon Schama’s prose. Hate it. He is a shameless, heedless over-writer of the self-regarding not-as-funny-as-he-thinks kind. If two adjectives will work, six will work even better. Here is Amsterdam as rendered by Schama:
"By the time Pieter Segerszoon had gone to his Maker in 1603, there were twice the number of folk in the city and all manner of voices could be head on the Dam: eastern accents, thick and yawning, from Gelderland and Overijssel; German gutturals; the soft glottals of Walloons and Brabanders; the singsong gurglings of Norwegians and Danes; the the legato run of Italian consonants that made the speakers sound as though they were on the verge of bursting either into a song or a fight.” (p. 221)
Notice how Schama runs the gamut from clichés (those Italian “legato runs” and the singing and fighting) to what is basically nonsense: what is a “thick and yawning” accent? Or “singsong gurglings” for that matter. Some readers like this sort of thing, but I don’t. It didn’t come as a surprise, since I’d read Schama’s pieces in the New Yorker for years and found him to be insufferable for these very reasons.
Such bad writing is not merely an annoyance, it can also lead to a kind of moral failing, which I think it does in this book. It is bad enough to give northern European ethnic stereotypes a workout, but it is even worse when this elephantine “playfulness” is applied to individuals. Virtually every biographical aspect of the lives discussed in this book gets worked over this way. It doesn’t help matters that Schama is one of those people who feel inclined to spell out in great detail his opinion of physical appearances. Virtually everybody in the book is described with all the snarkiness and off-hand cruelty of a News of the World celebrity profile of who is fattest on the beach this summer.
***
So why so many stars? I freakin’ loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. For one thing, it is gorgeously printed and intelligently laid out – the full color reproductions are top-notch, and even the black and white stuff is fine. They illustrations are scattered throughout the book and are always within a page of the text where they are being discussed.
Another thing that saves this book from its author is, paradoxically, its author. When Schama gets around to talking about the actual paintings (which he does a lot, fortunately), his over-cooked ridiculous prose actually works for him. This is, I think, because he takes paintings more seriously than the artists who painted them (or the models who sat for them). He talks about the art with passion and intelligence and respect. Although he sometimes crosses over into art crit afflatus (hello John Berger) he never wholly succumbs. And he has a good eye for telling details, important information about revisions, modifications, and damage suffered.
The book is also admirably organized, if not exactly as advertised. A large chunk of it – over a third perhaps – is devoted to Peter Paul Rubens, whose life and career were ending just as Rembrandt’s career was starting. Ruben’s life was fascinating – he was in the full sense of the word a Renaissance man. Cultured, talented, socially adroit and civic-minded. He was a uxorious husband and a good father to boot. Despite being a mere craftsman (as painters still were then), he wound up acting as a kind of diplomat without portfolio running secret missions between Spain and the Netherlands, trying to bring peace. That he was used by both side for the typically cunning yet stupid high level diplomacy that seems to characterize most international politics. This discouraged him, but it did not seem to make him cynical.
I never thought I cared much for Ruben’s art – all that Rubenesque stuff, you know – but Schama – again, when he actually sticks to talking about art – is a reliable and enthusiastic guide and I found myself realizing how narrow-minded and clichéd and ignorant I was when it came to Ruben’s achievement. His “Descent from the Cross” is sublime.
But Rembrandt is who I was most interested in and strangely enough, for all of Schama’s frantic adjective-mongering, Rembrandt remained a kind of shadowy, sketchy personality in this book. Unlike Shakespeare, there is quite a bit of information available, but for some reason he just doesn't quite emerge from the impasto here. But we still have the paintings, and that's what matters.
"By the time Pieter Segerszoon had gone to his Maker in 1603, there were twice the number of folk in the city and all manner of voices could be head on the Dam: eastern accents, thick and yawning, from Gelderland and Overijssel; German gutturals; the soft glottals of Walloons and Brabanders; the singsong gurglings of Norwegians and Danes; the the legato run of Italian consonants that made the speakers sound as though they were on the verge of bursting either into a song or a fight.” (p. 221)
Notice how Schama runs the gamut from clichés (those Italian “legato runs” and the singing and fighting) to what is basically nonsense: what is a “thick and yawning” accent? Or “singsong gurglings” for that matter. Some readers like this sort of thing, but I don’t. It didn’t come as a surprise, since I’d read Schama’s pieces in the New Yorker for years and found him to be insufferable for these very reasons.
Such bad writing is not merely an annoyance, it can also lead to a kind of moral failing, which I think it does in this book. It is bad enough to give northern European ethnic stereotypes a workout, but it is even worse when this elephantine “playfulness” is applied to individuals. Virtually every biographical aspect of the lives discussed in this book gets worked over this way. It doesn’t help matters that Schama is one of those people who feel inclined to spell out in great detail his opinion of physical appearances. Virtually everybody in the book is described with all the snarkiness and off-hand cruelty of a News of the World celebrity profile of who is fattest on the beach this summer.
***
So why so many stars? I freakin’ loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. For one thing, it is gorgeously printed and intelligently laid out – the full color reproductions are top-notch, and even the black and white stuff is fine. They illustrations are scattered throughout the book and are always within a page of the text where they are being discussed.
Another thing that saves this book from its author is, paradoxically, its author. When Schama gets around to talking about the actual paintings (which he does a lot, fortunately), his over-cooked ridiculous prose actually works for him. This is, I think, because he takes paintings more seriously than the artists who painted them (or the models who sat for them). He talks about the art with passion and intelligence and respect. Although he sometimes crosses over into art crit afflatus (hello John Berger) he never wholly succumbs. And he has a good eye for telling details, important information about revisions, modifications, and damage suffered.
The book is also admirably organized, if not exactly as advertised. A large chunk of it – over a third perhaps – is devoted to Peter Paul Rubens, whose life and career were ending just as Rembrandt’s career was starting. Ruben’s life was fascinating – he was in the full sense of the word a Renaissance man. Cultured, talented, socially adroit and civic-minded. He was a uxorious husband and a good father to boot. Despite being a mere craftsman (as painters still were then), he wound up acting as a kind of diplomat without portfolio running secret missions between Spain and the Netherlands, trying to bring peace. That he was used by both side for the typically cunning yet stupid high level diplomacy that seems to characterize most international politics. This discouraged him, but it did not seem to make him cynical.
I never thought I cared much for Ruben’s art – all that Rubenesque stuff, you know – but Schama – again, when he actually sticks to talking about art – is a reliable and enthusiastic guide and I found myself realizing how narrow-minded and clichéd and ignorant I was when it came to Ruben’s achievement. His “Descent from the Cross” is sublime.
But Rembrandt is who I was most interested in and strangely enough, for all of Schama’s frantic adjective-mongering, Rembrandt remained a kind of shadowy, sketchy personality in this book. Unlike Shakespeare, there is quite a bit of information available, but for some reason he just doesn't quite emerge from the impasto here. But we still have the paintings, and that's what matters.
November 28, 2021
If Rembrandt’s career had a high-point, it was probably the Spring of 1642. Thirty-six years old and the most successful painter in Amsterdam, he was head of a busy workshop attracting paying students from all over the Netherlands and beyond. It was also the year of The Night Watch, his most prestigious and lucrative commission. And yet, even during this period our knowledge of him is sketchy; he wrote few letters and never kept a diary or journal.
Simon Schama’s solution is to suggest a picture of the man himself by telling us (at some length) about everything else; so, a bit like Tristram Shandy, we’re beyond page 200 before we even get to Rembrandt’s birth. Those first two hundred pages, in fact, are a biography of Peter-Paul Rubens, the painter at that time and who the young Rembrandt (perhaps) aspired to out-paint. Besides being a great artist himself, Rubens was also a diplomat: for decades he acted as an envoy to the Netherlands when his native Flanders was a Spanish colony—so Schama gives us the political and historical background to all that. Rembrandt by contrast, son of a miller, grew up in the conservative, ultra-Calvinist, town of Leiden—so we get plenty of background about Leiden, Calvinism and flour-milling. Later he moved to Amsterdam, so we get chapters about its founding, subsequent history, layout, geography…hydrographics…background backing up even further into its own background, and so on. It is one way of going about this, but for me didn’t quite come off—at times I felt I was reading the film version of The Invisible Man: doors opening mysteriously, furniture moving about on its own, but no Man himself.
When talking about Rembrandt’s art, though, now there Schama is superb: ‘The painting here is barely recognisable as brushwork at all…From zone to zone it varies radically in feel and texture where Rembrandt was evidently experimenting with different rates of drying and layering. In some passages, the paint seems first thickly laid on and then thinned out, by scouring, scraping, or combing, giving the upper layer a fibrous, stringily matted feel. In other areas, the paint is muddily coagulate, puddled, dripped, and caked; in other spots, more granular and abraded…the paint itself made more pasty and opaquely solid, often with the addition of gritty material like crushed quartz and silica…’
So what do we learn about Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (like Raphael and Michelangelo, one of that select band known by their first names)? Well, while he wasn’t a reader and owned few books, he was an insatiable collector of curiosities and his house was crammed with everything from antique weapons and musical instruments, fossils, shells and lumps of coral, to a stuffed (and legless) Bird of Paradise. His intelligence is obvious from the sheer amount of thought that went into his paintings, but the death of his wife Saskia (of tuberculosis, also in 1642 not long after the completed Night Watch was handed over) changed his art and, surely, helped produce the character which Schama summarises as, ‘rather cantankerous, compulsively avaricious…a cranky and disagreeably eccentric figure, short-fused and obdurate…’ His later troubles (and they were many) were mostly self-inflicted.
He was also undeniably a genius, the drawings at least as good as the paintings and this book does them justice—perfect reproductions throughout. Schama also gets across just how far ahead of his time Rembrandt was. Even by the mid-seventeenth century the majority of Amsterdam’s money was still in the hands of the Church and the aristocracy, so to make a living as a painter largely meant doing Bible-scenes and formal portraits. Both had extremely strict rules about what did, and what did not, make an acceptable painting, and Rembrandt could do these better than most. But he also had a mind of his own, the mind of a true artistic explorer; and after the lukewarm reception which greeted Night Watch, then the death of Saskia, increasingly went his own way. He began to probe beyond the edges of the artistic map, leaving behind the photographic realism then in fashion and experimenting with ways of painting which would today be called ‘impressionistic’ and wouldn’t be explored as seriously again for another two hundred years. The reaction was predictable: to his contemporaries these ‘rougher’ pictures looked unfinished and received the same baffled stares and outright hooting the likes of Turner, Degas and Monet would all be subjected to in England and Paris two centuries later.
One thing we do know well about Rembrandt is what he looked like, because he painted plenty of self-portraits and at every stage of his career. I lived in London for thirty years and often used to hike up Highgate Hill just to stand in front of the one in Kenwood House: there he sits, looking back at us from almost four centuries ago as if he’s just this second put his brush down, the paint still wet. And that steady, unruffled, expression on his face: approaching sixty now, his life has been pretty much a disaster; he’s alone, virtually penniless and much of his work derided. But the best of it, particularly those ‘unfinished’ ones like this very self-portrait, will light up the future history of art. And he knows.
Simon Schama’s solution is to suggest a picture of the man himself by telling us (at some length) about everything else; so, a bit like Tristram Shandy, we’re beyond page 200 before we even get to Rembrandt’s birth. Those first two hundred pages, in fact, are a biography of Peter-Paul Rubens, the painter at that time and who the young Rembrandt (perhaps) aspired to out-paint. Besides being a great artist himself, Rubens was also a diplomat: for decades he acted as an envoy to the Netherlands when his native Flanders was a Spanish colony—so Schama gives us the political and historical background to all that. Rembrandt by contrast, son of a miller, grew up in the conservative, ultra-Calvinist, town of Leiden—so we get plenty of background about Leiden, Calvinism and flour-milling. Later he moved to Amsterdam, so we get chapters about its founding, subsequent history, layout, geography…hydrographics…background backing up even further into its own background, and so on. It is one way of going about this, but for me didn’t quite come off—at times I felt I was reading the film version of The Invisible Man: doors opening mysteriously, furniture moving about on its own, but no Man himself.
When talking about Rembrandt’s art, though, now there Schama is superb: ‘The painting here is barely recognisable as brushwork at all…From zone to zone it varies radically in feel and texture where Rembrandt was evidently experimenting with different rates of drying and layering. In some passages, the paint seems first thickly laid on and then thinned out, by scouring, scraping, or combing, giving the upper layer a fibrous, stringily matted feel. In other areas, the paint is muddily coagulate, puddled, dripped, and caked; in other spots, more granular and abraded…the paint itself made more pasty and opaquely solid, often with the addition of gritty material like crushed quartz and silica…’
So what do we learn about Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (like Raphael and Michelangelo, one of that select band known by their first names)? Well, while he wasn’t a reader and owned few books, he was an insatiable collector of curiosities and his house was crammed with everything from antique weapons and musical instruments, fossils, shells and lumps of coral, to a stuffed (and legless) Bird of Paradise. His intelligence is obvious from the sheer amount of thought that went into his paintings, but the death of his wife Saskia (of tuberculosis, also in 1642 not long after the completed Night Watch was handed over) changed his art and, surely, helped produce the character which Schama summarises as, ‘rather cantankerous, compulsively avaricious…a cranky and disagreeably eccentric figure, short-fused and obdurate…’ His later troubles (and they were many) were mostly self-inflicted.
He was also undeniably a genius, the drawings at least as good as the paintings and this book does them justice—perfect reproductions throughout. Schama also gets across just how far ahead of his time Rembrandt was. Even by the mid-seventeenth century the majority of Amsterdam’s money was still in the hands of the Church and the aristocracy, so to make a living as a painter largely meant doing Bible-scenes and formal portraits. Both had extremely strict rules about what did, and what did not, make an acceptable painting, and Rembrandt could do these better than most. But he also had a mind of his own, the mind of a true artistic explorer; and after the lukewarm reception which greeted Night Watch, then the death of Saskia, increasingly went his own way. He began to probe beyond the edges of the artistic map, leaving behind the photographic realism then in fashion and experimenting with ways of painting which would today be called ‘impressionistic’ and wouldn’t be explored as seriously again for another two hundred years. The reaction was predictable: to his contemporaries these ‘rougher’ pictures looked unfinished and received the same baffled stares and outright hooting the likes of Turner, Degas and Monet would all be subjected to in England and Paris two centuries later.
One thing we do know well about Rembrandt is what he looked like, because he painted plenty of self-portraits and at every stage of his career. I lived in London for thirty years and often used to hike up Highgate Hill just to stand in front of the one in Kenwood House: there he sits, looking back at us from almost four centuries ago as if he’s just this second put his brush down, the paint still wet. And that steady, unruffled, expression on his face: approaching sixty now, his life has been pretty much a disaster; he’s alone, virtually penniless and much of his work derided. But the best of it, particularly those ‘unfinished’ ones like this very self-portrait, will light up the future history of art. And he knows.
August 14, 2020
The immense heft of this book always made it a precarious investment, Unsuited to overseas travel and simply not practical to take to work daily, the book remained in a limbo of utility and my attentions have languished for likely a decade until this fortunate alignment of the stars. Was I disappointed? Yes, yes I was. Aside from the overwriting, Schama devotes much of the book first half to Rubens, who was a lodestar to Rembrandt. We also have detailed accounts of the culinary fare available in Amsterdam. All of this is rather interesting, but is it germane?
I wanted discussions of light and shadow in Rembrandt. I was an explication of The Night Watch. I received both.
Ultimately this tome was equipped to address my issues of visual illiteracy and for that I am most grateful. I do think I will refrain from reading Schama for the time being.
I wanted discussions of light and shadow in Rembrandt. I was an explication of The Night Watch. I received both.
Ultimately this tome was equipped to address my issues of visual illiteracy and for that I am most grateful. I do think I will refrain from reading Schama for the time being.
November 14, 2010
This is a beautiful meticulously written biography on the works and life of Rembrandt. Every chapter branches off into new stories about the historic happenings and beliefs of the 17th century time which give you a very solid understanding of the world and human life at that time. A little long-winded but highly informative. Simon Schama teaches you how to properly look at Rembrandt's paintings.
April 5, 2023
Саймон Шама в этой книге ужасно напоминает Радзинского в лучшие годы: каскады прилагательных, цветистые метафоры, по три-четыре страницы описаний запахов, звуков и вкусов городов XVII века, восхваление «гения» (как общего места и некой почти абстрактной единицы измерения успешности художника в веках), безаппеляционность суждений и самолюбование.
December 14, 2016
This is an impressive book. It's a critical biography of Rembrandt full of Schama's elegant prose and full of colorful reproductions of Rembrandt's masterworks. The comprehensive analysis of the art and the artist probably ensure this to be the definitive general work on Rembrandt for years to come.
February 24, 2016
5+ stars. Probably the best book I read all year and the 700 huge pages only took me 8 months…Schama is brilliant on the history as well as the art criticism. Beautiful prints, too.
July 24, 2010
If you have not yet discovered Simon Schama, then you are in for a real treat. This book reads as smooth as historical fiction, but has all the footnotes to prove it is so much more than that. Schama is a historian that understands the soul of Rembrandt. If an advid art enthusiast, or new to the subject, you will love this book. Schama examines Rembrandt through the Ruben's perspective and explains how important Rubens was for not only Rembrandt, but every other artist of that time period. There is rarely a time in the past three years that this book has not been in my backpack. I can't seem to live without it.
January 2, 2022
I read this in conjunction with a Rembrandt exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Simon Schama is able to provide the context of the times that Rembrandt lived and as a result this life comes alive with the life and art of this artistic genius. The details about the development of Rembrandt as and artist and businessman are illuminating, but there is also the story of the rising middle class, the customers, who filled the walls of their homes with paintings from Rembrandt and his contemporaries. The studios of these painters were kept busy during the era chronicled by Schama in another of his histories, The Embarrassment of Riches. The commentary on Rembrandt's development as an artist and his use of colors and unusual subjects is worth the read, but Schama's prose style makes the reading a pure pleasure.
May 20, 2021
Достаточно хорошо, пусть и нудновато написанная биография, причем не только Рембрандта, но и Рубенса. Крутой контраст в судьбе, да и в мировоззрении. Рубенс мирской и при этом полусвятой, а Рембрандт вглубь копает, всё про всех понимает, очень тонко чувствует, но и человек из него... Представляю, как видели его современники, которые ничего не секли в живописи - странный какой-то мужик, мнит себя художником, живёт в незаконном браке, денег нет порой даже на еду, а он всё картины малюет, нет чтобы на нормальную работу пойти :))
May 14, 2009
If you can wade through this incredibly detailed and meaty book, you will acquire an indigestion of insight, and will no doubt be the smartest kid at the party of all things Rembrandt.
November 27, 2025
What a lovely book. 800 A4 pages with paintings, etchings and drawings on almost every one. I felt lucky to find it in a charity shop. Schama indulges himself with masses of discursive prose - the first 150 pages are mostly about Reubens and the cultural politics of the Protestant and Catholic Netherlands and their various engagements with Spain. But so what? He’s a lovely stylist, his love for the paintings is obvious, he’s incapable of writing a sentence which doesn’t tell the reader something interesting. And ultimately it’s just a way to spend happy hours looking at and learning about some of the greatest paintings of all time.
March 5, 2020
Een mooie mix van geschiedenis en interpretaties van Rembrandt's schilderijen.
Ik had dit boek beter eens gelezen voor ik naar het Rijksmuseum ging.
Ik had dit boek beter eens gelezen voor ik naar het Rijksmuseum ging.
June 18, 2023
A most masterful book. It transcends its subject matter in so many ways. It begins with a quote by Paul Valery - we should apologize for daring to speak about painting. We are so lucky Schama dared. He writes history, philosophy and personality together, imbues them with meaning, and then connects them with Rembrandt van Rijn's best works. In fact what he does with characters like Rubens and Huygens is even more remarkable. Rembrandt's family history, his own tragedy and comedy and power makes life so alive. We are lucky there are amazing books like this. The best kind of biography masquerading as an art book!
*
I am at page 294, and I really do not want to stop allowing this book to let me live in Leiden or Antwerp or Mantua or Madrid for many more weekends! This book is like Grand Theft Auto - the game (I have installment #5 in mind) - you think it will tell you about Rembrandt, and you hear it will also tell you about Rubens, and you become a little apprehensive about what a stuffy Columbia academic has to tell you about people dead for 400 years. But then you read some excerpts and hear a little more about Schama and his grandiose style and you start to build up hope. Then you actually start reading this beautifully typeset and illustrated big 700+ page doorstopper of a book and you are given a magnificent historical treatment of the Eighty Years' War, colored by individual characters, and generations of humanity that lead to the creation of Rubens and Rembrandt - the fall of Flanders, the rise of Northern Netherlands, the fall of Spain, the rivalry between Antwerp and Amsterdam, the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants, and within that the rivalry between remonstrant and non-remonstrant Calvinists. Schama doesn't wear his learning lightly, he loves to show off (example: early Rembrandt biographer having 9 Lievens's and no Rembrandts, damn that cracked me up!), and he loves to build minute details, the beeldenstroms that destoryed Antwerp's great churches, the details of Leiden's neighborhoods which defined Lievens or Rembrandt, the philosophy driving Rubens's house, the beautiful descriptions of Mantua and Madrid. I have not read many art history books, but this book reads so much like a Simon Winder style contextual history, makes you wonder at the fertility and futility of the War and the Golden Age, and then it gives you the real stuff - a deep appreciation of painting, almost teaching you, handholding you, on the striking level of details and contrasts, and how, pictorially, Rembrandt, and even Rubens, were such revolutionaries.
*
I am at page 294, and I really do not want to stop allowing this book to let me live in Leiden or Antwerp or Mantua or Madrid for many more weekends! This book is like Grand Theft Auto - the game (I have installment #5 in mind) - you think it will tell you about Rembrandt, and you hear it will also tell you about Rubens, and you become a little apprehensive about what a stuffy Columbia academic has to tell you about people dead for 400 years. But then you read some excerpts and hear a little more about Schama and his grandiose style and you start to build up hope. Then you actually start reading this beautifully typeset and illustrated big 700+ page doorstopper of a book and you are given a magnificent historical treatment of the Eighty Years' War, colored by individual characters, and generations of humanity that lead to the creation of Rubens and Rembrandt - the fall of Flanders, the rise of Northern Netherlands, the fall of Spain, the rivalry between Antwerp and Amsterdam, the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants, and within that the rivalry between remonstrant and non-remonstrant Calvinists. Schama doesn't wear his learning lightly, he loves to show off (example: early Rembrandt biographer having 9 Lievens's and no Rembrandts, damn that cracked me up!), and he loves to build minute details, the beeldenstroms that destoryed Antwerp's great churches, the details of Leiden's neighborhoods which defined Lievens or Rembrandt, the philosophy driving Rubens's house, the beautiful descriptions of Mantua and Madrid. I have not read many art history books, but this book reads so much like a Simon Winder style contextual history, makes you wonder at the fertility and futility of the War and the Golden Age, and then it gives you the real stuff - a deep appreciation of painting, almost teaching you, handholding you, on the striking level of details and contrasts, and how, pictorially, Rembrandt, and even Rubens, were such revolutionaries.
May 28, 2023
It’s funny, this book. When I try to write about it I find myself instantly starting to complain about it. Here are some of my major kvetches:
This book is an encyclopedic survey of Rembrandt’s life and times but its central thesis is a sort of reheated anxiety of influence thing about Rembrandt trying to surpass Rubens, the greatest painter of the previous generation. This is so important to the book that the first 200 pages are all about Rubens’ life and times, with Rembrandt barely showing up until about a third of the way through this massive volume. Yet this thesis is not argued at all, just stated again and again (Citizens did the same thing with the cause of the French Revolution). Sure, they painted some of the same subjects — everyone did. And since Rubens was the most famous painter in the region at the time, surely Rembrandt was aware of and took some influence from his work. But anything beyond that is pretty shaky. So I have to call the main thesis of this book a complete failure.
Simon Schama has a unique thing going on with his prose. I would ultimately call him quite a good writer. He is great at digesting primary sources and spitting out vivid little details or moments. I really felt a sense of what the streets of Amsterdam and Leiden must have been like in the prosperous, bustling world of the Dutch Republic. But the whole time you can feel that he is a very good writer straining to be a great one and failing. It’s very off-putting sometimes. Here is his description of an the early Self-Portrait in a Gorget:
Isn't this an impressively equal ratio of “illuminating, clever, and evocative” to “overcooked, flowery bullshit” in one paragraph? “Lips highlit as if nervously licked,” “Least aquiline nose” — love it! “I-mean-business,” “mortal meeting the martial” — come on dude, please stop.
There’s a later section “Amsterdam Anatomized” that’s five long sections describing Amsterdam in terms of each of the senses. Again, parts of it are very fun to read. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading someone’s description of the fantasy city from their Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Description is great, but more description isn’t more evocative. Pynchon is another writer who loves lists and long, elaborate place descriptions but when he does it it leaves so much more UNsaid.
He also does the “opening sentence that grabs you” thing. I hate when authors do that, it’s such a Reddit idea of good writing and it betrays a certain condescension toward your audience. I’m a big boy and can let ideas or settings develop over a paragraph or two.
Also if you are allergic to history books with lots of “would have” “might have” and “must have” preceding a total imaginative flight of fancy, basically historical fiction, avoid this book at all costs. The scholarship is rigorous I’m sure, but no scholarship could get the access to the deep inner thoughts of Rembrandt and Rubens that Schama seems to have.
BUT! With that out of the way, the old bastard got me with this one. I loved it. He is a historian specializing in the Dutch Republic who later made the leap to middlebrow Art Guy for the BBC so this is basically the book he was born to write. Large stretches of this book cover Dutch history in a way that grounds it in the central figures of the painters. The story of Rubens’ father having an affair with a wealthy noblewoman is used as a starting point to tell the entire historical background of the Dutch revolt. Descriptions of Rembrandt’s portraits of wealthy traders will spin off into long digressions on shipbuilding or the textile industry. That might be a bit much if you just wanted to read about the paintings, but for me it enriched all the art discussion (of which there is lots) immensely.
Despite my complaints about the prose most of the actual descriptions of the paintings are very, very strong. The last book of his I read, Citizens, felt like he was writing it because he wanted to write the greatest history of the French Revolution to secure his place in the pantheon of great historians (he failed imo, see my review if you like). But here his passion for and infatuation with Rembrandt’s work is so evident. And the descriptions of Rembrandt's life are made so poignant by this wealth of detail. Schama’s sections on the paintings of his lovers and children makes reading about their untimely deaths so much more tragic, his paintings of himself in finery are so much more defiant when you read about the creditors chasing him down.
And (and it’s typically Schama-esque that it’s taken me so long to get here), the paintings and drawings themselves, I mean my God. This was a large and expensive book and the reproductions are very high quality and really well laid out. I didn’t get Rembrandt for a long time — all those browns, how muddy and depressing — and then I started to really like him after seeing a few of his paintings in real life (first the Juno at the Hammer museum and recently the unbelievable self-portrait at the Frick). After reading this and being exposed to so much of his work I am basically convinced he is in the human race’s starting lineup of geniuses.
Painting humans, in formal portraiture and in history painting, is about convincing the viewer that there is something going on behind the subject’s eyes, that you can see the likeness and imagine how they sound when they laugh, whether their voice is high or low, their movements graceful or clumsy, what you might talk about if you met them. After reading this I went to the Norton Simon and looked at their Rembrandt self-portrait and was struck dizzy. I know this man, I thought. I know (or feel as if I know) what brought him joy, his preoccupations, his tragedies, what he may have been like. That experience was worth all 800 pages of this book.
This book is an encyclopedic survey of Rembrandt’s life and times but its central thesis is a sort of reheated anxiety of influence thing about Rembrandt trying to surpass Rubens, the greatest painter of the previous generation. This is so important to the book that the first 200 pages are all about Rubens’ life and times, with Rembrandt barely showing up until about a third of the way through this massive volume. Yet this thesis is not argued at all, just stated again and again (Citizens did the same thing with the cause of the French Revolution). Sure, they painted some of the same subjects — everyone did. And since Rubens was the most famous painter in the region at the time, surely Rembrandt was aware of and took some influence from his work. But anything beyond that is pretty shaky. So I have to call the main thesis of this book a complete failure.
Simon Schama has a unique thing going on with his prose. I would ultimately call him quite a good writer. He is great at digesting primary sources and spitting out vivid little details or moments. I really felt a sense of what the streets of Amsterdam and Leiden must have been like in the prosperous, bustling world of the Dutch Republic. But the whole time you can feel that he is a very good writer straining to be a great one and failing. It’s very off-putting sometimes. Here is his description of an the early Self-Portrait in a Gorget:
“So here is the greatest trouper who never trod the boards playing Youngman Corporal, his I-mean-business gorget belied by the soft fringed collar falling over the studded metal, the slightly arched, broken eyebrow line (absent from the copy in The Hague), the deep set of the right eye, and the half-shadowed face, sabotaging the bravura, hinting at the vulnerability beneath the metal plate: the mortal meeting the martial. There is a touch too much humanity here to carry off the show. The light reveals a full, mobile mouth, the lips highlit as if nervously licked; large, liquid eyes; a great acreage of cheek and chin; and, planted in the center of his face, the least aquiline nose in seventeenth-century painting.”
Isn't this an impressively equal ratio of “illuminating, clever, and evocative” to “overcooked, flowery bullshit” in one paragraph? “Lips highlit as if nervously licked,” “Least aquiline nose” — love it! “I-mean-business,” “mortal meeting the martial” — come on dude, please stop.
There’s a later section “Amsterdam Anatomized” that’s five long sections describing Amsterdam in terms of each of the senses. Again, parts of it are very fun to read. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading someone’s description of the fantasy city from their Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Description is great, but more description isn’t more evocative. Pynchon is another writer who loves lists and long, elaborate place descriptions but when he does it it leaves so much more UNsaid.
He also does the “opening sentence that grabs you” thing. I hate when authors do that, it’s such a Reddit idea of good writing and it betrays a certain condescension toward your audience. I’m a big boy and can let ideas or settings develop over a paragraph or two.
Also if you are allergic to history books with lots of “would have” “might have” and “must have” preceding a total imaginative flight of fancy, basically historical fiction, avoid this book at all costs. The scholarship is rigorous I’m sure, but no scholarship could get the access to the deep inner thoughts of Rembrandt and Rubens that Schama seems to have.
BUT! With that out of the way, the old bastard got me with this one. I loved it. He is a historian specializing in the Dutch Republic who later made the leap to middlebrow Art Guy for the BBC so this is basically the book he was born to write. Large stretches of this book cover Dutch history in a way that grounds it in the central figures of the painters. The story of Rubens’ father having an affair with a wealthy noblewoman is used as a starting point to tell the entire historical background of the Dutch revolt. Descriptions of Rembrandt’s portraits of wealthy traders will spin off into long digressions on shipbuilding or the textile industry. That might be a bit much if you just wanted to read about the paintings, but for me it enriched all the art discussion (of which there is lots) immensely.
Despite my complaints about the prose most of the actual descriptions of the paintings are very, very strong. The last book of his I read, Citizens, felt like he was writing it because he wanted to write the greatest history of the French Revolution to secure his place in the pantheon of great historians (he failed imo, see my review if you like). But here his passion for and infatuation with Rembrandt’s work is so evident. And the descriptions of Rembrandt's life are made so poignant by this wealth of detail. Schama’s sections on the paintings of his lovers and children makes reading about their untimely deaths so much more tragic, his paintings of himself in finery are so much more defiant when you read about the creditors chasing him down.
And (and it’s typically Schama-esque that it’s taken me so long to get here), the paintings and drawings themselves, I mean my God. This was a large and expensive book and the reproductions are very high quality and really well laid out. I didn’t get Rembrandt for a long time — all those browns, how muddy and depressing — and then I started to really like him after seeing a few of his paintings in real life (first the Juno at the Hammer museum and recently the unbelievable self-portrait at the Frick). After reading this and being exposed to so much of his work I am basically convinced he is in the human race’s starting lineup of geniuses.
Painting humans, in formal portraiture and in history painting, is about convincing the viewer that there is something going on behind the subject’s eyes, that you can see the likeness and imagine how they sound when they laugh, whether their voice is high or low, their movements graceful or clumsy, what you might talk about if you met them. After reading this I went to the Norton Simon and looked at their Rembrandt self-portrait and was struck dizzy. I know this man, I thought. I know (or feel as if I know) what brought him joy, his preoccupations, his tragedies, what he may have been like. That experience was worth all 800 pages of this book.
March 25, 2011
As a longtime fan of author/historian/art critic Simon Schama from his History of Britain and Power of Art series respectively, I had no doubt that Schama would score big with Rembrandt's Eyes. The author captures perfectly the "up-and-coming on the economic world stage, hustle-bustle" feel of early seventeenth century Amsterdam and one of its greatest exports: Rembrandt van Rijn.
If you are familiar with Schama's narrative style, you'll know he is nothing at all like the typical stuffy, tweed coat wearing scholar boring the reader to death with mind-numbing regurgitation of facts. He's a wordsmith of the rarest kind; able to recount history in such a way that it's entertaining and informative. Bringing us little tidbits of information - events usually relegated to footnote status by other authors - that allows us to see into the past more thoroughly.
This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly, however. The hardcover version is big, bulky and probably weighs at least 5 lbs. (I meant to weigh the book before I returned it to my local library but never got around to it). Inside, though, Rembrandt's Eyes was a marvel for this artist. Gorgeous color plates of works by Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including Peter Paul Reubens (who gets his own section in the book) printed on smooth, glossy paper. I caught myself on more than one occasion admiring the finished product, as I'm sure many others have before me.
If you are familiar with Schama's narrative style, you'll know he is nothing at all like the typical stuffy, tweed coat wearing scholar boring the reader to death with mind-numbing regurgitation of facts. He's a wordsmith of the rarest kind; able to recount history in such a way that it's entertaining and informative. Bringing us little tidbits of information - events usually relegated to footnote status by other authors - that allows us to see into the past more thoroughly.
This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly, however. The hardcover version is big, bulky and probably weighs at least 5 lbs. (I meant to weigh the book before I returned it to my local library but never got around to it). Inside, though, Rembrandt's Eyes was a marvel for this artist. Gorgeous color plates of works by Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including Peter Paul Reubens (who gets his own section in the book) printed on smooth, glossy paper. I caught myself on more than one occasion admiring the finished product, as I'm sure many others have before me.
April 12, 2013
Quite the comprehensive work on Rembrandt, as you would expect from Schama. To tell the story of Rembrandt and his paintings, you get their story but intermingled with discources on painterly techniques. More than this though, you get the context with enough on Rubens to provide a separate biography of him. Schama understands, as he always has, that sometimes you need to step back to view the whole picture. Something I suspect Rubens and Rembrandt would agree on. Thus you even learn about Reuben's parents because it is relevant - indeed had the law been applied equally and/or Ruben's parents not been charming in their different ways, there would have been no Reubens as his father would have been executed before his conception. This is the kind of additional detail that really brings this tale to life and helps you to understand these painters as they may have understood themselves and each other. Needless to add, the political situations are all drawn in too. We even have an epilogue about what happened to Rembrandt's various heirs - biological and artistic.
What we have here is a Rembrandt in the round. Both traditional painter and proto-modernist, family man and philanderer, youth and old man. Indeed, the only reason I don't score this higher is because the subject is not as of interest to me as Schama's works on the French Revolution and that era in the Netherlands.
What we have here is a Rembrandt in the round. Both traditional painter and proto-modernist, family man and philanderer, youth and old man. Indeed, the only reason I don't score this higher is because the subject is not as of interest to me as Schama's works on the French Revolution and that era in the Netherlands.
April 28, 2018
Sometimes books are called "magisterial," to suggest their awesome power and scope, as in "your majesty," royalty. This book lives up to that term. It sweeps across a century of European history, encompassing not only the life and work of one of the world's greatest and most innovative painters (and a world-class etcher and sketcher,too), but also looks deeply at the times that shaped the man and the artistic rivalries and heroes who helped mark his path.
The book basically covers Belgium and Holland from the late 16th century through to nearly the end of the 17th century. It began with Antwerp as perhaps the wealthiest city in the world and was when Amsterdam definitively became the world's wealthiest city. Because Amsterdam's wealth was based on trade, its leaders became familiar with and accustomed to art (as well as food, animals, technology, etc.) from around the world. But at the same time, they retained a very parochial sense of what the world was -- with religion at the pinnacle.
Into this world, Rembrandt was born (under a slightly different name, as he took or was given the "van Rijn" part to reflect his adult decision to move to Amsterdam). His family was prosperous, but not gentry, and he received a good education and was apprenticed at a young age to local artists and then moved up the chain, with more important commissions, as his talent became obvious by age 20.
At the same time, Peter Paul Rubens was the most celebrated painter of the age -- considered a genuine heir to the Italian and Greek masters of antiquity. Rubens had, in fact, lived in Italy for a number of years in his 20s, imbibing the lessons of painting and, especially, sculpture. He brought that muscularity and theatricality to his paintings. And -- important -- Rubens was deeply Catholic and lived in Antwerp, which stayed Catholic during the incessant religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. The first quarter of this book is more about Rubens than about Rembrandt, and at first it seems a curious decision, like, why do I have to wade through this stuff about Rubens (who I don't even like, as it's way too overdone and way too full of winged cherubs)? But the point is that any artist living in 1600 Europe had to start with Rubens, and then decide where to go from there.
Rembrandt, who was from Holland not Belgium (oh, and by the way, Belgium wasn't a nation at the time), copied Rubens for a while. And he did it remarkably well. Sometimes even with a bit of arrogance, such as taking a pose from a famous Rubens painting and putting himself in it. But Rembrandt was not a Catholic; he was a Protestant, and while not on the level of severity of the Calvinists, he had to painting in less florid style. The book does a great job of explaining why Catholic painting was so over the top, and why Calvinist painting of the same Bible stories or the same formal portraiture of the rich had to be so different. Basically, Catholics believed that a church painting had to overwhelm its viewers with an emotional attachment to the subject, especially Jesus and his miracles and suffering. This was a direct bond with Jesus and the Holy Trinity -- and it had to be felt by those of high and low education immediately. Calvinists felt this was blasphemy -- that God wasn't about feeling, but was a distant ruler who preordained whatever was going to happen to you -- and images of the Trinity was idolatry. So they quite literally painted over Catholic images in churches and would allow only art like the 10 Commandments (sounds like Islam's restrictions). Rembrandt and many other Protestants were in the middle. They didn't go for the Rubenesque over-the-top Catholicism, but they liked their art nonetheless. So he and others developed a more muted, more realistic style to tell the same lurid and inspirational stories. The heart of the book goes through those details, with literally hundreds of reproductions of images.
It also reflected in Rembrandt's decisions throughout his career not to paint idealized people (though he did sometimes). He painted people as they really looked, starting with himself. If they were old, they looked old. If they had a wart, it showed. His women had real flab, and were not copies of Greek ideals. This was scandalous at the time and even for centuries afterwards, as critics and artists argued over whether art should show the ideal or the real. And it resonates through to today, whenever an artist dares to show an ugly reality. And Rembrandt was one of the first, and maybe the most prominent, to jump into the fray.
The book also details the financial travails of Rembrandt (in contrast to the astounding wealth that Rubens achieved), and the sadness in his life. Like so many others of his generation, he lost children and wives to a series of plagues that came to the Low Country almost every summer, sometimes taking a quarter of the population. Now, that might make you think about God....
Anyway, without going into every detail of the book, let's just say that it hits on all levels. It's a biography. It's an deep education -- painting by painting of a master painter -- with tremendous explanations in a page or less of what to look for in various works. It's a cultural history. It's a religious education with explanations I found tremendously helpful. And it explains what made Rembrandt special, especially as he aged and began to go beyond the styles that had been approved in his youth. Rembrandt began to layer his paints thicker and thicker, sometimes blending in ground up glass or ashes or even precious metals to give more texture. He stopped drawing with thin, defined lines -- although he could do it with the best of them. He wanted to show the truth, not an idealized version of reality. And he broke new ground in painting styles, selecting what to show (such as deeper closeups than other painters, with less attention to backgrounds, so as to give more energy to the key subject).
It's all there in this book. I'll observe that this is not an "easy read." It's deep, it's complicated, and I didn't understand many sections of it. One would probably have to have had a few college art classes to really understand all of it. But I got a lot out of it, and my understanding of art is much deeper than it was before.
The book basically covers Belgium and Holland from the late 16th century through to nearly the end of the 17th century. It began with Antwerp as perhaps the wealthiest city in the world and was when Amsterdam definitively became the world's wealthiest city. Because Amsterdam's wealth was based on trade, its leaders became familiar with and accustomed to art (as well as food, animals, technology, etc.) from around the world. But at the same time, they retained a very parochial sense of what the world was -- with religion at the pinnacle.
Into this world, Rembrandt was born (under a slightly different name, as he took or was given the "van Rijn" part to reflect his adult decision to move to Amsterdam). His family was prosperous, but not gentry, and he received a good education and was apprenticed at a young age to local artists and then moved up the chain, with more important commissions, as his talent became obvious by age 20.
At the same time, Peter Paul Rubens was the most celebrated painter of the age -- considered a genuine heir to the Italian and Greek masters of antiquity. Rubens had, in fact, lived in Italy for a number of years in his 20s, imbibing the lessons of painting and, especially, sculpture. He brought that muscularity and theatricality to his paintings. And -- important -- Rubens was deeply Catholic and lived in Antwerp, which stayed Catholic during the incessant religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. The first quarter of this book is more about Rubens than about Rembrandt, and at first it seems a curious decision, like, why do I have to wade through this stuff about Rubens (who I don't even like, as it's way too overdone and way too full of winged cherubs)? But the point is that any artist living in 1600 Europe had to start with Rubens, and then decide where to go from there.
Rembrandt, who was from Holland not Belgium (oh, and by the way, Belgium wasn't a nation at the time), copied Rubens for a while. And he did it remarkably well. Sometimes even with a bit of arrogance, such as taking a pose from a famous Rubens painting and putting himself in it. But Rembrandt was not a Catholic; he was a Protestant, and while not on the level of severity of the Calvinists, he had to painting in less florid style. The book does a great job of explaining why Catholic painting was so over the top, and why Calvinist painting of the same Bible stories or the same formal portraiture of the rich had to be so different. Basically, Catholics believed that a church painting had to overwhelm its viewers with an emotional attachment to the subject, especially Jesus and his miracles and suffering. This was a direct bond with Jesus and the Holy Trinity -- and it had to be felt by those of high and low education immediately. Calvinists felt this was blasphemy -- that God wasn't about feeling, but was a distant ruler who preordained whatever was going to happen to you -- and images of the Trinity was idolatry. So they quite literally painted over Catholic images in churches and would allow only art like the 10 Commandments (sounds like Islam's restrictions). Rembrandt and many other Protestants were in the middle. They didn't go for the Rubenesque over-the-top Catholicism, but they liked their art nonetheless. So he and others developed a more muted, more realistic style to tell the same lurid and inspirational stories. The heart of the book goes through those details, with literally hundreds of reproductions of images.
It also reflected in Rembrandt's decisions throughout his career not to paint idealized people (though he did sometimes). He painted people as they really looked, starting with himself. If they were old, they looked old. If they had a wart, it showed. His women had real flab, and were not copies of Greek ideals. This was scandalous at the time and even for centuries afterwards, as critics and artists argued over whether art should show the ideal or the real. And it resonates through to today, whenever an artist dares to show an ugly reality. And Rembrandt was one of the first, and maybe the most prominent, to jump into the fray.
The book also details the financial travails of Rembrandt (in contrast to the astounding wealth that Rubens achieved), and the sadness in his life. Like so many others of his generation, he lost children and wives to a series of plagues that came to the Low Country almost every summer, sometimes taking a quarter of the population. Now, that might make you think about God....
Anyway, without going into every detail of the book, let's just say that it hits on all levels. It's a biography. It's an deep education -- painting by painting of a master painter -- with tremendous explanations in a page or less of what to look for in various works. It's a cultural history. It's a religious education with explanations I found tremendously helpful. And it explains what made Rembrandt special, especially as he aged and began to go beyond the styles that had been approved in his youth. Rembrandt began to layer his paints thicker and thicker, sometimes blending in ground up glass or ashes or even precious metals to give more texture. He stopped drawing with thin, defined lines -- although he could do it with the best of them. He wanted to show the truth, not an idealized version of reality. And he broke new ground in painting styles, selecting what to show (such as deeper closeups than other painters, with less attention to backgrounds, so as to give more energy to the key subject).
It's all there in this book. I'll observe that this is not an "easy read." It's deep, it's complicated, and I didn't understand many sections of it. One would probably have to have had a few college art classes to really understand all of it. But I got a lot out of it, and my understanding of art is much deeper than it was before.
August 30, 2010
During one of my painting classes, I was assigned to do a master copy of one of Rembrandt's many self portraits. He was a 17th century artist who painted more self portraits than any other painter of his time. of course I needed to know as much about the man as well as the artist from whom I was to attempt to copy. I learned a lot about his life as well as the history of his influences and techniques. His life was marred by sorrow, as so many influential figures in history were. It didn't seem to effect his work, if anything, his artistry increased. I strive to learn how this type of mind works. I admired his passion, his drive. He didn't fall prey to the latest fashion, but strove to his own experimentation, unfortunately to his own demise, although to his current fame. He was clearly ahead of his time. I must say I felt the author went way to far off track with lengthy biography's about Rubens as well as any other figure connected and not connected to Rembrandt, so long as they lived within the same century! There were also many lengthy portions in Dutch history. I'm sure many of the details given by the author were well outside the eyes of Rembrandt.
January 12, 2009
I came to this book (and Simon Schama) via the "Acknowledgements" section of Zadie Smith's "On Beauty". Initially put away in favor of other things, a planned trip to Holland compelled me to break it out for another try.
It's undoubtedly a great book, but a bit of a daunting challenge due to not only the length, but the larger-than-average gravitational burden. The thick, glossy pages of paintings are beautiful and they complement Schama's text well, but damn if this book isn't impossible to transport at times.
It did to me as ZS advertised - teaches you to properly look at paintings. The sections on Dr. Tulps Anatomy Lesson and The Night Watch are worth the price of admission. Anyone who's seen Schama's "The Power of Art" knows his affection for Claudius Civilius, and that section doesn't disappoint.
I find Schama to be a pretty good writer. He can be a bit long-winded, but his wit and erudition more than make up for that. All-in-all a good book. But be sure to prepare your arm muscles if you plan to lug this thing around.
It's undoubtedly a great book, but a bit of a daunting challenge due to not only the length, but the larger-than-average gravitational burden. The thick, glossy pages of paintings are beautiful and they complement Schama's text well, but damn if this book isn't impossible to transport at times.
It did to me as ZS advertised - teaches you to properly look at paintings. The sections on Dr. Tulps Anatomy Lesson and The Night Watch are worth the price of admission. Anyone who's seen Schama's "The Power of Art" knows his affection for Claudius Civilius, and that section doesn't disappoint.
I find Schama to be a pretty good writer. He can be a bit long-winded, but his wit and erudition more than make up for that. All-in-all a good book. But be sure to prepare your arm muscles if you plan to lug this thing around.
May 3, 2016
An examination of Rembrandt's life and times through an exhaustive(and sometimes exhausting)examination of his work, this book also encompasses many other artists in his milieu, including Reubens, Bol, and Titian. Schama's enthusiasm for his subject is obvious and infectious, but like most lovers of a given subject, he becomes so enamored of his topic and its endless minutiae and tangential digressions that you find yourself wishing you could buff your tonails with a power sander to combat the tedium of that favorite pastime of academic, splitting the hair into its subatomic parts. It's a book best read in chunks rather than in feverish spurts hunched over its pages beneath the reading lamp.
As with much of Schama's work, the book abounds with illustrations and reproductions. If you are myopic or otherwise visually-impaired, magnification might be needed to see the myriad details.
As with much of Schama's work, the book abounds with illustrations and reproductions. If you are myopic or otherwise visually-impaired, magnification might be needed to see the myriad details.
August 31, 2010
It's a struggle sometimes when you read a review filled with enthusiasm and excited encouragement to read the book being described. The five stars I've given is a clue that this is one of those danger moments for the more sensitive reader.
Mr.Schama is a favourite human, Rembrandt is a miraculous artist and this book is a physics-busting combination of perfect plus perfect equalling more than perfect. It's a beautiful, inspiring and fascinating masterpiece that transports you into Rembrandt's world but also dazzlingly illuminates his paintings as they sit in our own.
It's time to get rickets, be in bed for two weeks, ban all visitors and swim in the luxurious, magical waters of this wonderful book. I've read few better and enjoyed no more pleasurable journeys.
Mr.Schama is a favourite human, Rembrandt is a miraculous artist and this book is a physics-busting combination of perfect plus perfect equalling more than perfect. It's a beautiful, inspiring and fascinating masterpiece that transports you into Rembrandt's world but also dazzlingly illuminates his paintings as they sit in our own.
It's time to get rickets, be in bed for two weeks, ban all visitors and swim in the luxurious, magical waters of this wonderful book. I've read few better and enjoyed no more pleasurable journeys.
January 24, 2017
A book superbly written by a specialist, Simon Schama, in both history and art. A book for those who love the 17th century in European history and artistic development. Easy to read, as the author has a most fluent style in narration, full of information on mainly Rubens and Rembrandt, but also on the many others who made that era a garden of blooming Flemish and Dutch art among the many wars, plagues and religious controversies. It is NOT a summer vacation book! It is a book for those interested in such topics, who also have at least some knowledge of European history and art. A book that enriches the reader!
June 1, 2024
Like most absurdly well-architectured books, the title works on multiple levels.
For an apprentice painter in Rembrandt's time, the first drawing drill was that of the human eye - its articulations, the proportional relationship between these articulations, its movement when differently animated by various passions, and it's capacity, to hopefully be actualized by the draftsman-in-training, to act as the proverbial window to the soul. Rembrandt's eyes, therefore refers to this perpetual trainee's progressively uncanny ability to marry the calm surface of the outward form, with the turmoiled waves within - a marriage made most manifest in his portraits, and, of course, his justly famous self-portraits.
But the title is not only a metaphor for his artistic calling - it is also, equally, a prosaic reference to the fact that these eyes were also instruments of visual perception, attached to a living, breathing, doughily rotund and slightly irascible human being called Rembran(d)t van Rijn, who lived, worked and died within the birth, life and death of the Dutch Golden Age.
With the title, therefore, the author has performed a dialectic sleight of hand ; the eyes which were the North Star of his artistic flowering, and the eyes which mediated the world in which that flowering was modulated and housed.
So what eventuates in this preposterously large book is not only an account of Rembrandt; his humble origins, his evolving mastery, the first devilishly jejune self-portraits, the naively eager large-scale history/Biblical paintings, the plethora of portraits that revealed more than his sitters were aware of, his flourishing into wealth and esteem, his eventual dissolution into the tragic withdrawal of the same, and his final, powerful raging against the dying of the light, prefiguring Cezanne by two and a half centuries, hurling paint on to the canvas with dervish fury and sculpting it with a drunk surgeon's waywardly precise inspiration. It is also an exhaustive account of the times in which he lived, the visual milieu that his eyes were immersed in ; a milieu which, in its turn, were the manifestation of the incessant, subterranean turmoil of place and time.
The first part of the book thus lays the background in thick and sturdy impasto - the flowering of Dutch Republicanism post the 80 Years War, the schism between a puritanical Protestantism and a decadently image-drunk Catholicism, the life and career of Rembrandt's painterly idol, Peter Paul Rubens, whose wealth, fame and diplomatic positions in the courts of European nobility presented a ideal that Rembrandt initially emulated, but eventually tragicomically failed to reach, the essentially bourgeoisie temperament of the Dutch, and their landmark empire built on maritime commerce. These thematic currents function as scaffolding that helps us understand the world in which Rembrandt grew to age - but, like a late Rembrandt portrait, this moody and dark background, serves to dramatically contour the foreground, which is where the almost-impossibly articulated finesse is to be found.
This is where the book comes to life. The details of Rembrandt's house, his street, his neighbors, his neighborhood with the views of the rivers and the barges, the smells of his environment, the political machinations within the emerging bourgeois that trickled down into the commissioning of his paintings, the Lebenswelt of mid-17th-century Amsterdam, are all brought uncannily to life by the author. It is almost Joyce-like in its immersive effect.
Simon Schama strikes me as the quintessentially English writer ; loquacious but never trying the reader's patience, erudite without ever steering into the realm of the purple, and scholarly without being dry ; I enjoyed the writing in this book tremendously. It had a real sense of animated propulsion, pausing occasionally to wreath words around some particularly poignant portrait or event from Rembrandt's life. There are a few obvious leaps of imagination, that become especially obvious towards the latter portions of the book - but even these are undertaken plausibly ; and while I would wager that the serious art historian would not be prepared to overlook these, I definitely was, because the writing had been so rewarding and rich throughout.
I don't have much knowledge or contact with art history, other than knowing the names of a few painters I like. But Simon Schama's effortless combination of animated and empathetic prose, along with the painstaking detail that brought Rembrandt's world to life, meant that I could not put this book down - which was a bit troublesome, because this book is massive ; not just in the extant of the text, but in its physical size as well. It is not a book that can be propped up to read in bed, for example. But the physical size is well worth it, because the book comes with several gorgeous reproductions of many of Rembrandt's famous paintings.
So what kind of book is this? I suppose it is technically art history, focusing on the growth and evolution of the painter Rembrandt, but I also found it an exploration of the flesh and blood striving in a physical world that produces seemingly eternal canvases - it is an excavation of the interrelationship between the artists' sociohistorical milieu and his art, giving the reader a crash course into the origins of the Dutch golden age, and the slightly sinister undercurrents of religious guilt that ran underneath it.
But what I found it overwhelmingly to be, was a emphatic paean to the power of painting - how a 17th-century Dutch draftsman was able to encompass a universe of meaning into the glint of an eye.
For an apprentice painter in Rembrandt's time, the first drawing drill was that of the human eye - its articulations, the proportional relationship between these articulations, its movement when differently animated by various passions, and it's capacity, to hopefully be actualized by the draftsman-in-training, to act as the proverbial window to the soul. Rembrandt's eyes, therefore refers to this perpetual trainee's progressively uncanny ability to marry the calm surface of the outward form, with the turmoiled waves within - a marriage made most manifest in his portraits, and, of course, his justly famous self-portraits.
But the title is not only a metaphor for his artistic calling - it is also, equally, a prosaic reference to the fact that these eyes were also instruments of visual perception, attached to a living, breathing, doughily rotund and slightly irascible human being called Rembran(d)t van Rijn, who lived, worked and died within the birth, life and death of the Dutch Golden Age.
With the title, therefore, the author has performed a dialectic sleight of hand ; the eyes which were the North Star of his artistic flowering, and the eyes which mediated the world in which that flowering was modulated and housed.
So what eventuates in this preposterously large book is not only an account of Rembrandt; his humble origins, his evolving mastery, the first devilishly jejune self-portraits, the naively eager large-scale history/Biblical paintings, the plethora of portraits that revealed more than his sitters were aware of, his flourishing into wealth and esteem, his eventual dissolution into the tragic withdrawal of the same, and his final, powerful raging against the dying of the light, prefiguring Cezanne by two and a half centuries, hurling paint on to the canvas with dervish fury and sculpting it with a drunk surgeon's waywardly precise inspiration. It is also an exhaustive account of the times in which he lived, the visual milieu that his eyes were immersed in ; a milieu which, in its turn, were the manifestation of the incessant, subterranean turmoil of place and time.
The first part of the book thus lays the background in thick and sturdy impasto - the flowering of Dutch Republicanism post the 80 Years War, the schism between a puritanical Protestantism and a decadently image-drunk Catholicism, the life and career of Rembrandt's painterly idol, Peter Paul Rubens, whose wealth, fame and diplomatic positions in the courts of European nobility presented a ideal that Rembrandt initially emulated, but eventually tragicomically failed to reach, the essentially bourgeoisie temperament of the Dutch, and their landmark empire built on maritime commerce. These thematic currents function as scaffolding that helps us understand the world in which Rembrandt grew to age - but, like a late Rembrandt portrait, this moody and dark background, serves to dramatically contour the foreground, which is where the almost-impossibly articulated finesse is to be found.
This is where the book comes to life. The details of Rembrandt's house, his street, his neighbors, his neighborhood with the views of the rivers and the barges, the smells of his environment, the political machinations within the emerging bourgeois that trickled down into the commissioning of his paintings, the Lebenswelt of mid-17th-century Amsterdam, are all brought uncannily to life by the author. It is almost Joyce-like in its immersive effect.
Simon Schama strikes me as the quintessentially English writer ; loquacious but never trying the reader's patience, erudite without ever steering into the realm of the purple, and scholarly without being dry ; I enjoyed the writing in this book tremendously. It had a real sense of animated propulsion, pausing occasionally to wreath words around some particularly poignant portrait or event from Rembrandt's life. There are a few obvious leaps of imagination, that become especially obvious towards the latter portions of the book - but even these are undertaken plausibly ; and while I would wager that the serious art historian would not be prepared to overlook these, I definitely was, because the writing had been so rewarding and rich throughout.
I don't have much knowledge or contact with art history, other than knowing the names of a few painters I like. But Simon Schama's effortless combination of animated and empathetic prose, along with the painstaking detail that brought Rembrandt's world to life, meant that I could not put this book down - which was a bit troublesome, because this book is massive ; not just in the extant of the text, but in its physical size as well. It is not a book that can be propped up to read in bed, for example. But the physical size is well worth it, because the book comes with several gorgeous reproductions of many of Rembrandt's famous paintings.
So what kind of book is this? I suppose it is technically art history, focusing on the growth and evolution of the painter Rembrandt, but I also found it an exploration of the flesh and blood striving in a physical world that produces seemingly eternal canvases - it is an excavation of the interrelationship between the artists' sociohistorical milieu and his art, giving the reader a crash course into the origins of the Dutch golden age, and the slightly sinister undercurrents of religious guilt that ran underneath it.
But what I found it overwhelmingly to be, was a emphatic paean to the power of painting - how a 17th-century Dutch draftsman was able to encompass a universe of meaning into the glint of an eye.
January 22, 2017
I'll admit to skimming through some of the historical scene-setting details but I loved reading about the greatest painter ever. Seeing a reproduction of "The Oathswearing of Claudius Civilis" for the first time was a real treat too. If he were alive today Rembrandt Harmentzsoon van Rijn might be our greatest graphic artist. I was in DC recently and went to the National Gallery(along with thousands of other people-it was Memorial weekend Saturday). Just blown away by the portraits in the Rembrandt gallery.
December 21, 2016
A beautiful book.A true labour of love. Schama shows us why Rembrandt was the greatest painter of the western world. He has analysed nearly all of Rembrandt's art work with great detail.I also learnt a lot about Peter Paul Rubens in this book.That was a welcome bonus. As someone who has admired Rembrandt's genius for a long time,i found this book to be an absolute treat.
July 30, 2008
Excellent biography of Rembrandt and his times with great reproductions.
Well written and entertaining as well as informative.
Well written and entertaining as well as informative.
September 2, 2012
Sweeping & engrossing.
April 7, 2020
This monumental study of Rembrandt, the product of what the author describes as “the attentiveness of an engaged beholder,” uses the recoverable facts of the artist’s life and close readings of his rich body of work in an act of mutual illumination. Both are set against a detailed description of the turbulent times: the war of independence from Spain and the decades of Amsterdam’s sway as the Venice of the North. By the time I finished, I was convinced that Rembrandt was indeed, as I suspected, the premier artist of the 17th century.
Rembrandt’s life followed an arc appropriate for such a towering artist: talent recognized early, spotted by an advisor to the Dutch court, the years of fame and lucrative commissions, the death of his wife, years of bankruptcy and scandal, and the masterpieces of the late years, scorned at the time since they were out of step with changing fashion.
He didn’t arise in a vacuum, any more than any artist does. In particular, he was inspired (and to a certain degree oppressed) by the example of his older contemporary on the other side of the new divide in the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens in Antwerp. Schama terms Rubens Rembrandt’s “paragon” in the full sense of the word, including both emulation and competition. To document this, Schama even includes a book within a book: a roughly two-hundred-page biography of Rubens.
Recurrent themes—physical blindness and spiritual insight, for instance—run through Rembrandt’s lifelong output. One feels his quest was not only artistic but also spiritual. In a time and place torn by confessional strife, Rembrandt remained the outsider. No record of his baptism has been found. He numbered among friends and clients Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews, as well as representatives of both sides of the quarrel over predestination and free will among the Protestants in the land. Schama calls him one of nature’s ecumenicals. Although not a church member, many of his best works have biblical themes. Among the thirteen canvases found in his studio in various stages of completion when he died are a pair, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” and “Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child,” that, taken together, seems a final confession and absolution.
Rembrandt’s entire life and career took place after the Dutch, inspired by the Reformation, banished all images from their churches, influenced by the command to make no graven images. Yet Rembrandt created what Schama calls Protestant icons. I think he is correct. When I first visited the Rijksmuseum, fifty-five years ago, one of the reproductions I bought, mounted on beaverboard, was “Peter’s Denial of Christ,” despite my Puritan fervor at the time that convinced me it was wrong to have depictions of God or Christ. Nevertheless, that print has traveled with me through every move and has hung in every one of a succession of home offices.
Be careful when you read this book: it is large and heavy. You might avoid aching wrists if you place it on a stand when you read it. Other than that, the only quibble I have is that sometimes the writing is too fine. In particular, Scham enjoys opening a new section circuitously, novelistically. This was disorienting at times. Aside from that, this book is a remarkable achievement, worthy of its subject.
Rembrandt’s life followed an arc appropriate for such a towering artist: talent recognized early, spotted by an advisor to the Dutch court, the years of fame and lucrative commissions, the death of his wife, years of bankruptcy and scandal, and the masterpieces of the late years, scorned at the time since they were out of step with changing fashion.
He didn’t arise in a vacuum, any more than any artist does. In particular, he was inspired (and to a certain degree oppressed) by the example of his older contemporary on the other side of the new divide in the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens in Antwerp. Schama terms Rubens Rembrandt’s “paragon” in the full sense of the word, including both emulation and competition. To document this, Schama even includes a book within a book: a roughly two-hundred-page biography of Rubens.
Recurrent themes—physical blindness and spiritual insight, for instance—run through Rembrandt’s lifelong output. One feels his quest was not only artistic but also spiritual. In a time and place torn by confessional strife, Rembrandt remained the outsider. No record of his baptism has been found. He numbered among friends and clients Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews, as well as representatives of both sides of the quarrel over predestination and free will among the Protestants in the land. Schama calls him one of nature’s ecumenicals. Although not a church member, many of his best works have biblical themes. Among the thirteen canvases found in his studio in various stages of completion when he died are a pair, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” and “Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child,” that, taken together, seems a final confession and absolution.
Rembrandt’s entire life and career took place after the Dutch, inspired by the Reformation, banished all images from their churches, influenced by the command to make no graven images. Yet Rembrandt created what Schama calls Protestant icons. I think he is correct. When I first visited the Rijksmuseum, fifty-five years ago, one of the reproductions I bought, mounted on beaverboard, was “Peter’s Denial of Christ,” despite my Puritan fervor at the time that convinced me it was wrong to have depictions of God or Christ. Nevertheless, that print has traveled with me through every move and has hung in every one of a succession of home offices.
Be careful when you read this book: it is large and heavy. You might avoid aching wrists if you place it on a stand when you read it. Other than that, the only quibble I have is that sometimes the writing is too fine. In particular, Scham enjoys opening a new section circuitously, novelistically. This was disorienting at times. Aside from that, this book is a remarkable achievement, worthy of its subject.
April 24, 2021
Sir Simon Schama is a British born historian specializing in art, Dutch, Jewish & French History. He is a Professor of history & art history at Columbia University, NYC. Just as an aside, I was amazed to find this book not listed on Wikipedia with the other books Sir Simon has authored.
How does one even begin to review a work of some 754 pages which deals with the life & work of one of the greatest painters of all time: Rembrandt van Rijn? This book is full of Dutch and artistic history. Schama is very thorough in providing a background against with the great Rembrandt lived & worked. In the course of presenting this, the author gives the reader a peek into lives a many other historic painters & their work. The illustrations, for the most part are beautiful, some more than others. What I liked especially were the explanations of Sir Simon of the details of paintings, Rembrandt's approached to his subjects, & Rembrandt's own mental, philosophical, spiritual and artistic attitudes which went into the making of his art work.
It's clear that Rembrandt, who enjoyed competing during his whole life with other up-and-coming artists...most espeially Peter Paul Rubens. Though they both made names for themselves as the "crème de la crème" of Dutch painting, they ended their lives in very different places. I hadn't realized that Rembrandt went bankrupt later in life & never fully recovered. Rubens ended up in much better shape.
This was an interesting book to read during this time of the COVID epidemic. It's amazing how many people among Rembrandt's immediate family & friends died of the bubonic plague, which surged at least three times during his life.
This book transported me back to a trip to Europe in 1998 where I was delighted to have briefly visited the Rijksmuseum where I was awed by Rembrandt's work, especially tje detail in it, and later the Prado in Madrid where Runbens' famous "The Three Graces" was on exhibit.
How does one even begin to review a work of some 754 pages which deals with the life & work of one of the greatest painters of all time: Rembrandt van Rijn? This book is full of Dutch and artistic history. Schama is very thorough in providing a background against with the great Rembrandt lived & worked. In the course of presenting this, the author gives the reader a peek into lives a many other historic painters & their work. The illustrations, for the most part are beautiful, some more than others. What I liked especially were the explanations of Sir Simon of the details of paintings, Rembrandt's approached to his subjects, & Rembrandt's own mental, philosophical, spiritual and artistic attitudes which went into the making of his art work.
It's clear that Rembrandt, who enjoyed competing during his whole life with other up-and-coming artists...most espeially Peter Paul Rubens. Though they both made names for themselves as the "crème de la crème" of Dutch painting, they ended their lives in very different places. I hadn't realized that Rembrandt went bankrupt later in life & never fully recovered. Rubens ended up in much better shape.
This was an interesting book to read during this time of the COVID epidemic. It's amazing how many people among Rembrandt's immediate family & friends died of the bubonic plague, which surged at least three times during his life.
This book transported me back to a trip to Europe in 1998 where I was delighted to have briefly visited the Rijksmuseum where I was awed by Rembrandt's work, especially tje detail in it, and later the Prado in Madrid where Runbens' famous "The Three Graces" was on exhibit.
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