Word: rembrandt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beset by adversity, Rembrandt retreated even farther into his Bible, using his son Titus and his Jewish friends as models. Among his favorites was Hendrickjke Stoffels, the simple peasant family maid whom Rembrandt made his mistress after the death of Saskia. His Bathsheba, for which Hendrickjke posed, is ranked as one of the greatest nudes in Western art, not because of her classic beauty (in fact, Hendrickjke was squat and dumpy), but because of the unsparing yet loving eye Rembrandt cast on her flesh, recreating it against the rich fabric background. Result: a study of the quiet inner resignation with...
...this effort to pierce through outward appearances that brought Rembrandt to his greatest insights in works such as The Denial of St. Peter. To depict the awesome moment, Rembrandt succeeded in portraying the intense inner struggle by relentlessly focusing the servant girl's light on the proud yet suffering features of Peter. In The Bridal Couple, probably painted the year before he died at 63, Rembrandt could still return boldly to another moment of drama for every man, raise it to the level of a welling symbol of devotion, acceptance and proud communion...
Painters' Painter. Ironically, the basic elements of Rembrandt's painting-his superb brush stroke and bold handling of color, his insistence on psychological insight, his dramatic use of light and shadow-long kept him in eclipse. Though in his own day Velasquez thought nothing of borrowing a pose from Rembrandt's Negress Lying Down (he used it for his own Venus), Rembrandt's reputation became primarily the custody of painters in later generations. In their hands, Rembrandt's work has become one of the richest lodes in Western...
...18th and 19th centuries his landscapes influenced a whole generation of English painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds made copies of Rembrandt's paintings, and so did Gainsborough and Turner. Goya's studio had ten Rembrandt prints, to which Goya freely admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael...
...20th century, when popular taste had long since caught up and the value of a Rembrandt oil soared to the million-dollar mark, American artists like John Sloan pored over his etchings for inspiration. Russian-born Chaim Soutine sat entranced through a whole day before Rembrandt's The Bridal Couple. Even Picasso, that great imitator, once paid Rembrandt the supreme compliment of confessing one failure. Beginning an etching, he says, "I started to doodle. It became a Rembrandt. I even made another one right away, with his turban, his furs, his eye-you know what I mean, his elephant...