A supreme master of landscape drawings, Rembrandt's extraordinary draftsmanship possessed a vitality and power that few artists ever achieve. This excellent volume displays in sharp, quality reproductions 60 authentic landscapes chosen from the great facsimile editions. Publisher's Note. Captions. 60 black-and-white illustrations.

This deluxe hardcover edition features drawings by the Dutch master from the collections of more than 20 European and American museums. Beautifully produced in a generous format on high-quality paper, this volume spans the artist's prolific career and includes superb examples of landscapes, biblical vignettes, figure studies, animal sketches, and portraits.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Rembrandt's oeuvre are his landscape drawings, around 260 of which have survived. Wandering through the city of Amsterdam, he depicted neighbourhoods, canals, houses along the city wall and bulwarks with picturesque windmills as well as distinctive individual buildings. Again and again he ventured into the surrounding landscape along the Amstel River or on the Kadijk and Diemerdijk, capturing characteristic scenes in quick sketches with pen and brush or black chalk. He was especially drawn to farmsteads with their neighbouring haystacks and groups of trees, depicting them in very different ways under changing conditions of light and weather. While some of his landscape studies are more expressive of an inner vision, in others the artist seeks to render the richness and beauty of natural forms with great attention to detail. In the late drawings, individual features dissolve into an atmosphere suffused with light and air.

Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the seventeenth-century poet Constantijn Huygens. Probing their conception of nature as 'the first Book of God' and art as its representation, Bakker identifies a world view that has its roots in the traditional Christian perceptions of God and creation. Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt imposes a new layer of interpretation on the richly varied landscapes of the great masters. In so doing it adds a new dimension to the insights offered by modern art-historical research. Further, Bakker's explorations of early modern art and literature provide essential background for any student of European intellectual history.