Michael Bockemühl (1943–2009)

The text of this book is awful, indulging as it does in hyperbolic flights of meaningless cod-philosophy to "explain" what is probably mostly the result of deteriorating eyesight on the part of Turner - and I quit the text at p66. Turner himself, however was a great artist with both oils and water-colours and the pictures reproduced here are a delight.

I don't know but I suspect that there's probably another affordable book about Turner that might show some more useful insight and I'd suggest show more looking for one before getting a copy of this. show less

The pictures are nice for reference, but lack enough quality to examine the details of his paintings. Granted, Turner's paintings are typically large scale with a lot of textures, making photographic reproduction nearly impossible.

As for the commentary, it did not really match will with the layout and lacked sizzle. For such a dynamic and influential painter the text was very dry and drab.

A useful book as a brief study on Rembrandt's work. The description was kinda boring in some pages but the drawings were amazing.

Rembrandt is thought to be one of the greatest painters of all time and the most important artist of the Dutch Golden Age. Unlike artists such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt achieved fame and wealth during his life time. His works include over 90 self portraits , 300 paintings and thousands of etchings. Most paintings were mythological in scope and depicted specific biblical themes.

Some of his stunningly exquisite biblical themed works are
Christ Driving The Money Lenders From the Temple, currently show more in private collection
Raising Lazarus Of Lazarus, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Ass of Balaam Balking before the Angel, Paris, Musee Cognacq-Jay

Interestingly, he spared no detail as he aged when painting his self portraits. Painting himself as a 63 year old man, the face is puffy and the body is corpulent.

His most famous painting is considered to be The Night Watchman,
located in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
The history of this painting is fascinating. Painted in 1642, in 1715 it was taken from the Kloveniersdolen to the Amsterdam town hall building and cut on all four sides to accommodate the large painting to fit between two columns. This grave mistake resulted in the loss of some characters, a balastrade and the top of steps, thus impacting on Rembrandt's intended perspective.

In 1975 and unemployed school teacher used a bread knife to slash the painting, resulting in large zig, zag slashes of damage. It was then repaired, but upon close inspection, some damage can still be noticed.

In 1990 a museum visitor sprayed acid on the canvas with a concealed pump bottle. The very smart security guards immediately, carefully, sprayed the painting with water and thus only part of the varnish was damaged.

Rembrandt's paintings are priceless. As mentioned previously in my threads, tragically in 1990 one of his only landscape paintings was stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardner museum in Boston. It has not surfaced and despite many futile attempts to track it down, it is lost to the public, perhaps forever:

It is my favorite of Rembrandt's paintings show less