Word: rembrandt
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...painters he really disliked relied on color and modeling by tone, "broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors. Their art is to lose form." Whereas his was "to find form, and to keep it"--by means of pure outline drawing. The villains of his scheme were Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt: "a class of artists, whose whole art is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art." True art was linear, clear, like Raphael, Durer, Michelangelo and antique sculpture--and, Blake didn't hesitate to add, his own. The very thought of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy...
...name Johannes Vermeer now carries a vast aura of desirability and sweetness. It has become one of the most beloved way points of art history, like Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca or Watteau. Nothing, it seems, is going to change that, but it wasn't always so. Vermeer's reputation is almost wholly posthumous. One of the reasons why he is so admired and his pictures are so unattainable a goal for collectors is precisely the cause of his obscurity in the 19th century: the rarity of his work...
...variegated tulips in a vase could not, as the catalog interestingly points out, have been done from life. (At the height of the Dutch tulip mania, such rare blooms would never have been cut for a painter; he would have had to draw them in the garden.) One of Rembrandt's more gifted pupils, Carel Fabritius, worked for a time in Delft until he had the spectacularly awful luck to be blown to pieces in the accidental explosion of the town's gunpowder magazine. And then there were minor artists of merely local interest, who are dutifully represented...
...Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. (through July 23), displays a collection of watercolor paintings of tulips from the 1630s, along with intriguing information about the frenzy over them. During that decade, the price of a rare tulip bulb escalated to as much as 5,200 guilders. (By comparison, Rembrandt's fee for The Night Watch was 1,600 guilders.) Bulbs were used as dowries and exchanged for shiploads of goods. People of all classes speculated in the bulbs in hopes of quick riches. The bubble eventually burst, of course, and authorities described it as a case of "misguided enthusiasm...
...17th century Holland. To survive, an artist needed wealthy patrons - and the more the better. Vermeer had few benefactors, and he gained no more than a quarter of his income from painting; most came from his mother-in-law and his work as an art dealer. While contemporaries like Rembrandt and Frans Hals specialized in large canvases, lively down-to-earth realism and volume - 40 or 50 paintings a year - Vermeer's pictures are small, frozen-in-time images with what Bailey calls, "the reality of dreams." Vermeer concentrated on interiors and demure women, and managed only a couple...