Word: rembrandt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...museum has only 60,000 visitors a year (as against 200,000 each for Munich and Cologne). Yet Kassel's Gemaeldegalerie can boast of one of the world's most brilliant collections of early German and Flemish paintings, topped by no fewer than 19 Rembrandts. Kassel can thank the art-loving Landgrave Wilhelm VIII, who ruled Hesse from 1751 to 1760. As a youth, Wilhelm did military service in the Low Countries, fell in love with Flemish art, and got in the habit of collecting it. Wilhelm's finest trophy was Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph...
...made his success with portraits, but Rembrandt preferred to paint religious subjects, which failed to interest Calvinist Amsterdam. Before his death, Rembrandt devoted 600 known drawings, 80 etchings and 160 paintings to Biblical subjects. Living with his common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, and his ailing son Titus in a ghetto garret, pitied by some and scorned by others, the fat old man was working joyfully, devotedly and profoundly for the ages. Among his inspirations was the warm and simple faith of the Mennonites. who taught direct recourse to the Bible, and the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme, who constantly employed...
...also shall become a people and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations." In Christian tradition, this solemn and mysterious scene foreshadows the eventual triumph of Christianity, symbolized by Ephraim, so Rembrandt makes the boy's hands form a cross...
With his genius for making light and darkness speak, Rembrandt surrounds the entire scene with a deathly shadow, concentrates the light mainly in Jacob as that moment's vessel of God's will, and then makes it leap and pour goldenly past the dark head and hurt eyes of Manasseh upon fair-haired Ephraim, who shines like his grandfather...