Contents 1. Rembrandt Self-Portraits: The Creation of a Myth - Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., National Gallery of Art, Washington 2. Reconstructing Rembrandt and His Circle: More on the Workshop Hypothesis - Walter Liedtke, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 3. Rembrandt at the Threshold - Susan Donahue Kuretsky, Vassar College 4. Comments on Rubens' Coup de Lance: Its Iconography, Style, and Importance for Eugène Delacroix - J. Richard Judson, Prof. Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 5. Rubens, His Patrons and Style - Walter Liedtke, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 6. Gender Issues in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture: A New Look - Alison McNeil Kettering, Carleton College 7. Remarks on Love, Woman, and the Garden in Netherlandish Art: A Study in the Iconology of the Garden - Sara M. Wages, The University of Maryland 8. The Strange Case of Jan Torrentius: Art, Sex, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Haarlem - Christopher Brown, The National Gallery, London 9. The Soothsayer by Jan Lievens in Berlin: An Attempt at an Interpretation - Maarten Wurfbain, Oegstgeest, The Netherlands 10. Ludolf de Jongh's The Refused Glass and Its Effects on the Art of Vermeer and De Hooch -Roland E. Fleischer, Prof. Emeritus, The Pennsylvania State University

An extraordinary history of Netherlandish drawing, focused on the training and skill of artists during the long 17th century With a lively narrative thread and thematic chapters, this book offers an exceptional introduction to Dutch and Flemish drawing during the long 17th century. Victoria Sancho Lobis discusses the many roles of drawing in artistic training, its function in the production of works in other media, and its emergence as a medium in its own right. Beautifully illustrated with some 120 drawings by artists including Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrick Goltzius, Gerrit von Honthorst, and Jacob De Gheyn, this book surveys current methodologies of studying these works and features a brief history of Dutch papermaking and watermarks as well as a glossary. Paying careful attention to materials and techniques, and informed by recent conservation treatments, Lobis explains how to look at these drawings as records of experimentation and skill, true windows into the artist’s mind.

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.

“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” —ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden. The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford. Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Morgan Library & Museum, June 3-September 18, 2016.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.