Rembrandt's Eyes
Simon Schama
Hard Cover
This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way. 'A capacious, generous book full of new ideas and information about not only Rembrandt but also his life, his times and his contemporaries. With Schama you look at a picture and see it as you hadn't before.' Doris Lessing, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 'With Rembrandt's Eyes, he has, as the cliché goes, found his subject - a perfect match for his talent and sympathies . . . moving and revealing . . . a Rembrandt very much for our time . . . an extremely coherent, satisfying work.' Alain De Botton, Independent on Sunday 'A supreme contribution to art history.' Anita Brookner, Spectator Books of the Year 'A bravura performance . . . Schama is an outstanding historian . . . In this new book he brings to his perception of Rembrandt not only a profound knowledge of the seventeenth century, but also a greedy fascination with the material expression of culture in every nook and cranny of life . . . Schama deepens and enriches our familiarity with Rembrandt, and makes us understand more fully why he has often been called the greatest painter of all time. Frances Spalding, Literary Review 'The Rembrandt riddle has now been tackled by that superbly gifted historian, Simon Schama . . . Schama speaks as an expert, but he wears his learning lightly; and few convey that learning more felicitously or fluently . . . this book holds the attention and fires the imagination . . . a portrait of the artist in the baroque manner.' Roy Porter, Independent 'Sumptuous . . . Impassioned and learned, expansive and discursive, Rembrandt's Eyes not only leaves us with a fierce appreciation of the artist's work but also immerses us inexorably in his world.' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Simon Schama
Hard Cover
This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way. 'A capacious, generous book full of new ideas and information about not only Rembrandt but also his life, his times and his contemporaries. With Schama you look at a picture and see it as you hadn't before.' Doris Lessing, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 'With Rembrandt's Eyes, he has, as the cliché goes, found his subject - a perfect match for his talent and sympathies . . . moving and revealing . . . a Rembrandt very much for our time . . . an extremely coherent, satisfying work.' Alain De Botton, Independent on Sunday 'A supreme contribution to art history.' Anita Brookner, Spectator Books of the Year 'A bravura performance . . . Schama is an outstanding historian . . . In this new book he brings to his perception of Rembrandt not only a profound knowledge of the seventeenth century, but also a greedy fascination with the material expression of culture in every nook and cranny of life . . . Schama deepens and enriches our familiarity with Rembrandt, and makes us understand more fully why he has often been called the greatest painter of all time. Frances Spalding, Literary Review 'The Rembrandt riddle has now been tackled by that superbly gifted historian, Simon Schama . . . Schama speaks as an expert, but he wears his learning lightly; and few convey that learning more felicitously or fluently . . . this book holds the attention and fires the imagination . . . a portrait of the artist in the baroque manner.' Roy Porter, Independent 'Sumptuous . . . Impassioned and learned, expansive and discursive, Rembrandt's Eyes not only leaves us with a fierce appreciation of the artist's work but also immerses us inexorably in his world.' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Simon Schama
Hard Cover
This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way. 'A capacious, generous book full of new ideas and information about not only Rembrandt but also his life, his times and his contemporaries. With Schama you look at a picture and see it as you hadn't before.' Doris Lessing, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 'With Rembrandt's Eyes, he has, as the cliché goes, found his subject - a perfect match for his talent and sympathies . . . moving and revealing . . . a Rembrandt very much for our time . . . an extremely coherent, satisfying work.' Alain De Botton, Independent on Sunday 'A supreme contribution to art history.' Anita Brookner, Spectator Books of the Year 'A bravura performance . . . Schama is an outstanding historian . . . In this new book he brings to his perception of Rembrandt not only a profound knowledge of the seventeenth century, but also a greedy fascination with the material expression of culture in every nook and cranny of life . . . Schama deepens and enriches our familiarity with Rembrandt, and makes us understand more fully why he has often been called the greatest painter of all time. Frances Spalding, Literary Review 'The Rembrandt riddle has now been tackled by that superbly gifted historian, Simon Schama . . . Schama speaks as an expert, but he wears his learning lightly; and few convey that learning more felicitously or fluently . . . this book holds the attention and fires the imagination . . . a portrait of the artist in the baroque manner.' Roy Porter, Independent 'Sumptuous . . . Impassioned and learned, expansive and discursive, Rembrandt's Eyes not only leaves us with a fierce appreciation of the artist's work but also immerses us inexorably in his world.' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire of gesture and grimace, 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, shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide. 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.'
More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains the most deeply loved of all the great masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at every age in his life, yet still so mysterious. Like Shakespeare, the facts of his life are hard to come by: the Leiden miller's son who briefly found fame in Amsterdam, whose genius was
fitfully recognized by his contemporaries, who fell into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is probably no painter around whose life more legends have grown up, nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been attributed (a process low undergoing rigorous reversal). Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for over twenty years, hows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to discovered in his pictures. Through a succession of brilliant descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly, and to think about it freshly.
But this book moves far beyond the bounds of conventional biography or art history. With extraordinary imaginative sympathy, and based on his profound knowledge of Holland and the Dutch in the seventeenth century, Schama conjures the world in which Rembrandt moved its sounds, smells and tastes as well as its politics - and the influences on him of the wars of the Protestant United Provinces against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of his native Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the ambitions of contemporaries. He shows us the central importance of Rembrandt's beloved wife Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later forced to sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels. Above all, he demonstrates the profound effect on Rembrandt of the leading master of the immediately preceding generation, the great Catholic, Antwerp painter Peter Paul Rubens, the prince of painters and the painter of princes' with whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of his life, and against whose biography Schama sets Rembrandt's in illuminating counterpoint.
