Word: rembrandt
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...Gallery's exhibition, previously shown to packed galleries in Berlin and Amsterdam, is meant to explain the committee's methods and make the case for their soundness. It consists of two sections. In the first are 51 paintings now agreed to be indubitably by the master -- the finest "pure" Rembrandt show in memory. The second consists of a dozen "Rembrandts" now assigned to artists who worked with him; each of these is shown with two or three other paintings known to be by that pupil. In all, it is a wonderfully illuminating show, and it makes an unanswerable case...
...should be happy to give 10 years of my life," said Vincent van Gogh to a friend as they were gazing at Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in Amsterdam in 1885, "if I could go on sitting here in front of this painting for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food." This (more or less) describes the fate of Rembrandt's own apprentices. The Jewish Bride (circa 1665) is Rembrandt through and through; but many Rembrandts are not, for the simple reason that (contrary to romantic legends of his poverty and his rejection by the stuffy bourgeoisie...
...what young painter in his right mind would not want to be with Rembrandt? He was so fashionable that, as one of his more classical-minded contemporaries sourly complained, "artists were forced (if they wanted to have their work accepted) to accustom themselves to his manner of painting: even though they themselves might have a far more commendable manner." Small planets in the gravitational field of an immense talent, some would eventually break out of orbit to make independent careers for themselves, but all of them -- while they were with Rembrandt -- had to work...
UNLIKE RUBENS, REMBRANDT was not particularly scrupulous about saying which pictures were entirely by him and which were done in part by assistants, and the result -- coupled with the fact that when his reputation recovered from its short eclipse after his death, everyone who owned a brown luminous 17th century Dutch portrait wanted it to be by Rembrandt -- has been a web of confusion...
Wishful thinking has been an immense factor in Rembrandt attribution. More than 1,000 paintings have been ascribed to Rembrandt, and they cannot all be by him. The reductionists' ax of the Rembrandt Research Project has fallen on paintings that no one with half an eye, after seeing this show, could go back to thinking of as Rembrandts: How did the light, high-colored, almost garish Feast of Esther by Jan Lievens, or the finicky execution of Gerrit Dou, ever get mistaken...