HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama
Loading...

Rembrandt's Eyes (original 1999; edition 1999)

by Simon Schama, Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
702732,275 (4.2)35
"Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Through a succession of descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh." "Rembrandt's Eyes shows us why Rembrandt is such a thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama's understanding of Rembrandt's mind and the dynamic of his life allows him to re-create Rembrandt's life on the page."--Jacket.… (more)
Member:ChocolateMuse
Title:Rembrandt's Eyes
Authors:Simon Schama
Other authors:Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn
Info:Knopf (1999), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 750 pages
Collections:Your library, Favorites
Rating:*****
Tags:non fiction, best of best, art, history

Work Information

Rembrandt's eyes by Simon Schama (1999)

None
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 35 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 7 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  justlurking | Nov 28, 2021 |
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. ( )
  HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
I just finished this book today, after reading it in bits and pieces for about a year. And wow, what a staggering work of art this book is! I don't really have a clue how to 'review' it adequately. What even is Rembrandt's Eyes? It's many things: a joint biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt Van Rijn; a highly accessible and absorbing history of 17th century Netherlands - political, religious and social - and it's also a book about art. Is it ever. The book as a whole is a horizon-widener and an immersion into worthwhile things. Reading it has taught me more about how to look at art, how to understand it in my own way - actually how to be less afraid of it. Also, I now realise something of the magnitude of Rembrandt's genius - how ahead of his time he was, and how marvellous his vision was. Without understanding the context, I would have seen him as a shadowy, browny-black kind of painter, and his later style especially wouldn't have had any meaning for me at all (blind fool that I would have been!). I owe a debt of gratitude to Simon Schama for this book - as I've said elsewhere, Schama is one of the few genuine men of letters still writing today. Real scholarship (as opposed to research grants and PhDs) with personality and individuality. A modern-day Hazlitt or Pepys. ( )
11 vote ChocolateMuse | Feb 24, 2013 |
A beautiful book, full of color and b/w images, recounts the lives of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt. Schama masterfully weaves art history, Dutch history, and religious-political history into a seamless story. The time period is described with real-world accuracy and an immersive quality. Besides the real and immediate, he also describes the complex and abstract issues -- from political disputes to religious quarrels -- with the same vigor and enthusiasm. If you are interested in the history of art, Dutch history, or for a rip-roaring biography, "Rembrandt's Eyes" is a book I can highly recommend. ( )
2 vote kswolff | Feb 11, 2009 |
beautiful publication with lots of images
  robertg69 | Oct 29, 2008 |
Showing 1-5 of 7 (next | show all)
Although there are too many of them, some of the descriptions of individual pictures are vivid and moving. Schama is at his best talking straight about what he sees, when he doesn't get carried away by the aspiration to verbal pyrotechnics or by the desire to say too much of what he knows.
 
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

"Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Through a succession of descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh." "Rembrandt's Eyes shows us why Rembrandt is such a thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama's understanding of Rembrandt's mind and the dynamic of his life allows him to re-create Rembrandt's life on the page."--Jacket.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Haiku summary

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (4.2)
0.5
1
1.5
2 1
2.5
3 12
3.5
4 17
4.5 6
5 23

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 203,208,486 books! | Top bar: Always visible