San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums are home to an astonishing collection of graphic arts, including a vibrant holding of essential masterworks by Rembrandt--arguably his generation's most influential artist. This stunning book places Rembrandt's achievements in context, setting the stage primarily with prints and drawings from the turn of the 17th century and tracing the impact he had on his many followers. In a series of thematic sections, author James A. Ganz explores the rich print culture of the era, focusing on representations of artists and their world, portraiture, natural history, scenes of daily life, landscape, and subjects drawn from mythology and religion. This visually compelling survey balances the contributions of painter-printmakers like Rembrandt, Ostade, Castiglione, and Ribera against the works of such specialized graphic artists as Callot, Hollar, and Doomer. Filled with virtuosic engravings to ambient etchings, exquisite ink drawings to fanciful watercolors and more, this book illustrates the enormous range and appeal of printmaking and drawing techniques in Rembrandt's century.

"This book embeds Rembrandt's art in the pluralistic religious context of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, arguing for the restoration of this historical dimension to contemporary discussions of the artists. By incorporating this perspective, Zell confirms and revises one of the most forceful myths attached to Rembrandt's art and life: his presumed attraction and sensitivity to the Jews of early modern Amsterdam."--BOOK JACKET.

Examines the causes, circumstances, and effects of the 1656 bankruptcy by Rembrandt van Rijn.

H. Perry Chapman has produced the first comprehensive treatment of the entire body of Rembrandt's self-portraits in their cultural and historical setting and in the context of the artist's life. Prevailing scholarship has tried to discredit the idea that the self-portraits stemmed from any particular inner need, but Chapman counters by presenting fascinating evidence that they represent a conscious and progressive quest for individual identity in a truly modern sense. "H. Perry Chapman, in my view, gives us the Rembrandt we need in the 1990s. . . . [Her] sensitivity to questions of style and expression, combined with original research, leads to a conclusion . . . that `Rembrandt's lifelong preoccupation with self-portraiture can be seen as a necessary process of identity formation or self-definition'--in short, autobiography."--Walter Liedtke, The Journal of Art "Chapman is a graceful writer. Her arguments are balanced, well documented, and vigorously pursued. . . . The publication of this book is cause for gratitude and joy."--Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

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.

This book sheds light on the fascinating ways Rembrandt and other Golden Age painters were influenced by Eastern culture. In the 17th century, Amsterdam was a vibrant hub of the burgeoning European trade with Asia, Africa, and the Levant, importing copious amounts of foreign items that powerfully stimulated the imagination of numerous Dutch artists. This was notably the case with Rembrandt, whose curiosity and voraciousness as a collector were legendary in his time. Throughout his prolific career, he drew on Eastern influences in genres as diverse as history painting and portraiture, including depictions in which he himself adopted Oriental styled attire. This lavishly illustrated book explores the inventive ways in which Rembrandt and his contemporaries accommodated Eastern imagery into their own repertoire, set within the wider context of Holland's rapidly expanding commercial and cultural exchange with its non-European trading partners. The problematic term "Orient" was widely used in Rembrandt's time and will be discussed at great length in this catalogue.

There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries. Rembrandt's Jews puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam—which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood—Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented—far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now—a trip that, under ever-threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.