Rembrandt

Numéro d'article 10125578

134 plates 58 in colour. About this Book REMBRANDT’S GREAT ACHIEVEMENT was his marriage of technical mastery to an immense range of expression drawn from genuine psychological insight. No other painter has left us a more vivid testimony to his personality than Rembrandt in the self-portraits which he drew, etched and painted throughout his life, and all his work, from the most personal sketches to the great Biblical prints and canvases, reveals an intimate understanding of human nature. The artist’s career, from the promising beginnings to the enjoyment of fame and fashionable patronage and final decline into debt and ruin, are faithfully recorded in this book against the background of a private life beset by bereavement and misfortune. Rembrandt’s creativity, however, remained undimmed until his death, and M. Muller provides us with a sensitive analysis of all aspects of his art (his draughtsmanship, composition, use of colour and chiaroscuro) and shows how such diverse influences as Classicism and Baroque were combined into a fiercely individual style. The threads of life and art are skilfully interwoven, and the picture emerges of a monumental personality—unconventional, uncompromising, and perpetually at odds with his bourgeois, Calvinist environment. JOSEPH-EMILE MULLER was born in 1911 in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As director of the educational department of the Musée de l’État in Luxembourg since 1945, he has mounted numerous exhibitions and given hundreds of lectures. His first published art criticism dates from 1934. He is the author of Fauvism (in ‘The World of Art Library’) and Modern Painting from Manet to Mondrian, and has written studies of Klee, Seurat and Maurice Estève. Contents CHAPTER ONE Son of a miller CHAPTER TWO Art in a Calvinist country CHAPTER THREE Early compositions CHAPTER FOUR Deciphering the human face CHAPTER FIVE First drawings and etchings CHAPTER SIX Fame and happiness CHAPTER SEVEN Notes in the sketchbook CHAPTER EIGHT The temptation of baroque