Sylvie Rosenberg escaped the Holocaust-- but can she escape the past? October 20, 1942. Benjamin Katz and his six-year-old daughter Sylvie stand with their frightened family at a train station in occupied Holland, unsure if the train would take them to their freedom-- or to a death camp. Hitler and his henchmen have long had their eye on the art collection of Benjamin and his brother, which includes Rembrandt's "Portrait of Raman." Now the brothers are faced with the ultimate choice --part with the art, or suffer the consequences. Based on a true story, Rembrandt's Shadow is the tale of two women from different generations who find themselves forced to confront each other years later-- while still haunted by the past.

Roughness is the sensual quality most often associated with Rembrandt's idiosyncratic style. It best defines the specific structure of his painterly textures, which subtly capture and engage the imagination of the beholder. Rembrandt's Roughness examines how the artist's unconventional technique pushed the possibilities of painting into startling and unexpected realms. Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl as well as firsthand accounts by Rembrandt's contemporaries, Nicola Suthor provides invaluable new perspectives on many of the painter's best-known masterpieces, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. She focuses on pictorial phenomena such as the thickness of the paint material, the visibility of the colored priming, and the dramatizing element of chiaroscuro, showing how they constitute Rembrandt's most effective tools for extending the representational limits of painting. Suthor explores how Rembrandt developed a visually precise handling of his artistic medium that forced his viewers to confront the paint itself as a source of meaning, its challenging complexity expressed in the subtlest stroke of his brush. A beautifully illustrated meditation on a painter like no other, Rembrandt's Roughness reflects deeply on the intellectual challenge that Rembrandt's unrivaled artistry posed to the art theory of his time and its eminent role in the history of art today.

For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.

Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg's Stealing Rembrandts is a spellbinding journey into the high-stakes world of art theft Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted. In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world - from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio - the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums. There are robbers who coolly walk off with multimillion dollar paintings; self-styled art experts who fall in love with the Dutch master and desire to own his art at all costs; and international criminal masterminds who don't hesitate to resort to violence. They also show how museums are thwarted in their ability to pursue the thieves - even going so far as to conduct investigations on their own, far away from the maddening crowd of police intervention, sparing no expense to save the priceless masterpieces. Stealing Rembrandts is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind look at the black market of art theft, and how it compromises some of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.

Apprenticeship and ambition - Rejoicing and mourning - Lonliness and banckruptcy - Retirement and death - Documents.

Jan Lievens (1607-1674) was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic Dutch artists of the 17th century. Daring and innovative as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman, he created powerful character studies, genre scenes, landscapes, formal portraits, and religious and allegorical images that were widely praised and valued during his lifetime. This beautiful book, the first overview of the full range of Lievens' career, features more than 50 paintings--many of them newly discovered in private collections--and more than 75 prints and drawings, providing a reassessment of his place in the history of art. Lievens began his career in his native Leiden, where he worked closely with his compatriot Rembrandt, who admired and collected Lievens' works. Lievens then moved to London, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, and his peripatetic career and multitude of working styles, say the authors of this book, may explain why his reputation today is not as high as it should be. This book offers a necessary corrective, returning to Lievens the esteem he deserves. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington (October 26, 2008 - January 11, 2009) Milwaukee Art Museum (February 7 - April 26, 2009) Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam (May 17 - August 9, 2009)

Since the second half of the last century art historians, realizing that the image of Rembrandt’s work had become blurred with time, have attempted to redefine the artist’s significance both as a source of inspiration to other artists and as a great artist in his own right. In order to carry on the work started by previous generations, a group of leading Dutch art historians from the university and museum world joined forces in the late 1960s in order to study afresh the paintings usually ascribed to the artist. The researchers came together in the Rembrandt Research Project which was established to provide the art world with a new standard reference work which would serve the community of art historians for the nearby and long future. They examined the originals of all works attributed to Rembrandt taking full advantage of today’s sophisticated techniques including radiography, neutron activation autoradiography, dendrochronology and paint sample analysis — thereby gaining valuable insight into the genesis and condition of the paintings. The result of this meticulous research is laid down chronologically in the following Volumes: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Volume I, which deals with works from Rembrandt’s early years in Leiden(1629-1631), published in 1982. THIS VOLUME: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Volume II, covering his first years in Amsterdam (1631-1634), published in 1986. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Volume III, goes into his later years of reputation (1635-1642), published in 1990. Each Volume consists of a number of Introductory Chapters as well as the full Catalogue of all paintings from the given time period attributed to Rembrandt. In this catalogue each painting is discussed and examined in a detailed way, comprising a descriptive, an interpretative and a documentary section. For the authenticity evaluation of the paintings three different categories are used to divide the works in: A. Paintings by Rembrandt, B. Paintings of which Rembrandt’s authorship cannot be positively either accepted or rejected, and C. Paintings of which Rembrandt’s authorship cannot be accepted. This volume (Volume II) contains 900 pages, starting of with five introductory chapters and discussing 101 paintings. In clear and accessible explanatory text all different paintings are discussed, larded with immaculate images of each painting. Details are shown where possible, as well as the results of modern day technical imaging.