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Traces the life and career of one of the world's greatest painters and analyzes Rembrandt's paintings, discussing the artist's use of light and assessing his powerful and perceptive portraits. Original. ... Read more

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Presents a brief overview of the life and work of this seventeenth-century Dutch painter, describing and giving examples of his work. ... Read more

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Universally acclaimed as one of the greatest artists of all time, Rembrandt often turned to Scripture for inspiration.Many of his works, crafted with vitality and emotion that stir the spirit, depict events of the Christmas story.This unique collection of reproductions of color oils, drawings, and black and white etchings depict everything from the angel Gabriel's announcement of Jesus' birth to the adoration of shepherds and wise men.Each piece is accompanied by the Scripture that inspired the seventeenth century artist.This a lavish, beautiful gift book that will become a treasured Christmas tradition.Hardcover.80 Pages. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Gorgeous Gift Book
This beautiful, 72 page book is a great gift for art lovers and Christians. Its introduction explains Rembrandt's possible inspiration and some details for each work. The text of the KJV Bible gives the book a devotional quality. Both text and art make for good meditation during a busy Christmas season. My favorite is the drawing on the book's cover, shown in full on page 27. It's a tender portrait of Mary and Jesus, possibly modeled by Rembrandt's wife and first child. I think knowing that the child died after two months makes this drawing all the more poignant to me. Jesus, God Almighty incarnate as a human, was just as frail as Rembrandt's first born.

Beautiful marriage of art and scripture
This volume is a wonderful marriage of art by Rembrant and text from theGospel infancy narratives.Thus the book revolves around well knownepisodes: the annunciation, Mary's visit to Elizabeth, the birth of Johnthe Baptist, the birth of Jesus, the angel appearing to the shepherds ...etc.Some of the texts have multiple paintings and etchings associatedwith them; this has the effect of allowing the art more than the word totell the story.This is an excellent book for anyone interested inreligious or biblical art.

Why so small?
The pictures of this book are very good and the text fits well, however, having copies of the other two books in this series, "The Life Of Christ" and "The Old Testament", I was a bit dissapointedwith the size of this book. The publishers seem to be attempting one ofthose "gift" books and in doing this they do a great disserviceto the artist. ... Read more

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Author Molly Blaisdell transports young readers to the city of Amsterdam in the 1650s. It is a time when world-renowned artist Rembrandt van Rijn is at the height of fame among his patronsÂ--and when his young son Titus longs to imitate his father and become a great painter. At first, Rembrandt rebuffs TitusÂ's attempts at drawing, telling the boy he is too young to learn art. But gradually, the master painter is won over by his sonÂ's enthusiasm and persistence, and he begins to teach a very happy Titus the basic techniques of drawing from life. Here is a warmhearted story for children, with illustrations that capture the atmosphere of seventeenth-century Holland and suggest some of the genius that radiates from RembrandtÂ's own magnificent paintings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Rembrant had a pet monkey!
Dogs, a monkey, the Amsterdam skyline, and a little boy who wants to grow up to be just like his daddy... this charming book will inspire young artists and daddy's of little boys, too! A great deal of historical information is worked very naturally into the text. A good book for every budding artist.

K. Hamilton

Fun!
A great way to stimulate a child's curiosity about Art History! The story contrasts the intensity of the father with child's point of view. Nice layering of the story and beautiful illustrations. This story conveys the human story of an iconic artist through the developing relationship with his son.

Clever way to make a famous artist relevant
This book makes Rembrandt relevant and relatable to kids by presenting the artist, in part, from the point of view of his son. The story makes us sympathetic to the son, Titus, and his own artistic development while showing a good view of life in the mid-seventeeth century and cleverly integrating the artist's work into the illustrations. Great for budding artists, young dog lovers, and history buffs alike.

A beautiful introduction to Rembrandt
This sensitively written book combines colorful illustration, historical information with a storyline that appeals to children and adults alike. You and your children will cheer young Titus on as he gains confidence and learns to draw with the help of his father, the great master, Rembrandt.This is a wonderful gift for the artist in all of us.

A Wonderful Window into Rembrandt's World
A beautiful book! I love the way the story is integrated with colorful modern illustrations juxtaposed with Rembrandt's own moody, emotive work. Blaisdell renders the world of this artist an inviting one by allowing us to view it through the eyes of Rembrandt's young son Titus. On one hand, Titus contends with a household of rambunctious pets who make a mess his father's studio, and on the other, struggles with his desire to win his father's approval. The gentle story-telling brings to life not only the world of a great artist, but the enduring warmth of a son's relationship with his father. It's clear that the mission of the book is to introduce kids to art and the artistic process, and the book definitely succeeds in this. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Throughout his life, Rembrandt created many illustrations of biblical themes. In this book, Rembrandt's inspiring paintings are placed with the corresponding stories of Jesus' life. The beautiful full-color paintings and pen-and-ink drawings bring the events recorded in the Scripture to life in Rembrandt's elegant style. ... Read more

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Universally acclaimed as one of the greatest artists of all time, Rembrandt often turned to Scripture for inspiration. Many of his works, crafted with vitality and emotion that stir the spirit, depict events of the Old Testament. Rembrandt: The Old Testament features reproductions of sixty-eight of these pieces, including color oils, drawings, and black-and-white etchings. In this truly unique collection, each piece is accompanied by the Scripture that inspired the seventeenth-century artist. ... Read more

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Neat, but a coffee table type book
This is a good look if you are studying the arts or this artist in particular. Not the best for classroom reference. ... Read more

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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 ... Read more

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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. More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains the most deeply loved of the great masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at every stage 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 fitully 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 now undergoing rigorous reversal). "Rembrandt's Eyes", about which Simon Schama has been thinking for over 20 years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be 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 imaginative sympathy, and based on his profound knowledge of Holland and the Dutch in the 17th 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.Amazon.com Review
The great 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn left usso many arresting self-portraits, painted at every stage in hiseventful life, that his distinctive face and bearing are a familiarpart of the 20th-century cultural landscape, a recognizable presencein galleries across Europe and North America. Nonetheless, the artisthimself remains an enigma. Rembrandt was a notoriously difficult manand an inveterate risk taker in life and art: his aspirations to agrandiose Amsterdam lifestyle in the heyday of his popularity as apainter of portraits and large-scale historical works bankrupted him,and he died in relative poverty. His personal effects and treasuredcollection of paintings and natural rarities were sold off anddispersed, leaving the historian with a tantalizingly scant body offragmentary records around which to build a convincing biography.

In Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama--the leading historical craftsman of our era, with a career-long commitment to Dutch history--succeeds with consummate skill in bringing the heroic painter of such masterpieces as The Night Watch and Portrait of Jan Six vividly to life. Returning to the bustling Dutch world with which he first made his reputation in the bestselling Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Schama re-creates Rembrandt's life and times with all the verve and panache of a historical novelist--while never for an instant losing his scrupulous grip on recorded fact and detail. The telling surviving fragments of archival information about Rembrandt's personal and professional history are skillfully embedded in a rich, dense tapestry of the commercial whirl and political hurly-burly of the 17th-century Low Countries--a divided territory, split between the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the contested powers of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Dutch Republic--with the tentacles of the tale reaching into the most unexpected shadowy corners of European love and war, aspiration and intrigue.

Rembrandt's Eyes is, in fact, two biographies for the price of one. From the outset, Schama contrasts the life of Rembrandt with that of his older, equally talented countryman Peter Paul Rubens, whose meteoric rise and sustained success as a society painter forms a revealing contrast with Rembrandt's unhappier relationship with fame and fortune. The comparison is a telling one. Where Rubens furnishes the wealthy and powerful with glorious reflections of, and visual foils for, their social and political aspirations and glory, Rembrandt can never resist testing the envelope of taste and stylistic acceptability. His challenge to his clients to embrace the shock of his painterly experiments with technique, texture, and composition ultimately produced his downfall. The Amsterdam town council took down his The Oath-swearing of Claudius Civilis, rolled it up, and returned his masterpiece to him to be cut down in an attempt to sell it to a suitable buyer.

This is a gorgeous book to own, too. Rembrandt's Eyes is printed on heavy, high-gloss paper and lavishly illustrated throughout in full color. The double-page color spreads of the most memorable of Rembrandt's works will take readers' breath away. But above all, this is narrative history at its very best, a page-turner and an adventure story that will make the reader laugh and cry by turns in the time-honored tradition of masterly writing. --Lisa Jardine ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Rembrandt's Eyes
Simon Schama is a true gift to the historian and art lover alike. His masterful prose, detailed yet captivating storytelling are unrivaled. He has a very pleasant bias in favor of intellect and, as he sees it, truth. I never tire of him and wish he were more in evidence as a commentator in other media, including TV.

Wonderful book on the times and art of Rembrandt
I'm going to be brief here. First, my in-depth knowledge of the Dutch Masters is limited, so I will not comment on the veracity of Mr. Schama's information on this. However, the book was very easy to read, even for a book of such depth (and pages!) I actually found the chapters on Peter Paul Rubens to be the most fascinating. Contrasting Rubens and Rembrandt on opposite sides of the religious divide of the Lowlands was very interesting and gives us great insight on an era mostly forgotten by modern people.

I am more an historian than artist, so at times his commentary (while obviously based on a great love of art) on the paintings of Rembrandt went on a bit much for me, but I certainly can see where a true art historian would love these passages.

Overall it is a wonderfully fascinating book that reveals so much about the life and times not only of Rembrandt, but of Rubens, Constantine Huygens, and the triumphal and sad history of the Revolt of the Netherlands.

Five Star Perfection
There is no better writer about art or art history than Simon Schama.He helps me see things and then I think "Of course, why didn't I think of that"He has a way of making obscure things clear.All of his books are first rate.

Excellent book about Rembrandt and his times
Being Dutch, I remember as a kid how my teacher was mesmerizing about how wonderful it would be to have a big enough telescope to catch all the emitted light from long ago and to be able to see Rembrandt paint. I did not know why then, but now I do agree. How wonderful it would have been had he only lived 300 years more to light up all the museums in the world!
This book is about, to my opinion, the best painter of mankind, his life and work. It is also a dual biography about Rubens, since he was so important for Rembrandt.
The book works nicely chronological and winds its way through the younger years of Rembrandt til his last years. In the mean time we also learn a lot about not only his life in Leiden and Amsterdam, but also about the history of Holland of the 17th century. It is absolutely great to learn about for instance the Night Watch, for whom it was painted, who the people are on it, why it was so revolutionary and still the most stunning 17th century painting.
I always wanted to know, as far as recorded history allows us, about the background of his paintings; who ordered it, did they and Rembrandt like it themselves? And most of all: analysis of the paintings themselves: what 'effects' are used, and how? This book goes into wide details of this all without getting repetitive or boring.
Rembrandt is unique among all painters in his combination of talent and 'raffinement'. He could do anything: super precise works, impressionistic style where the paint itself was the 3d effect, portraits, group portraits, history paintings, landscapes, the best etches off all time. His touch and well-aimed strokes immediately got to the essence. His works under scrutiny come out even more unsurpassable and amazing. It is true that none of his students ever came close to his talent, and some of them tried for the rest of their life to master just some aspect of his art (for instance the light effects) while Rembrandt moved on to a more 'rough' style, although it was justly called in this book deceivingly easy to imitate, and of course, 'rough' here does not mean carelessly painted.
Basically he is the first (and best) impressionist in the history of painting.
I have been at the Rijksmuseum many times, and it does not matter which work you look at: Jeremia, his mother reading, the Jewish Bride, his hypnotisingly beautiful self portrait at a young age, it just shows that this is a once in a mankind kind of thing. Rembrandt has shown us once and for all what the art of painting can do, how it can lift our lives by trying so dramatically to imitate it. Indeed looking at his work, it almost seems that his paintings are triumphant over reality.
This book is a great read and the many colour pictures of his work are, needless to say, a pleasure to look at.
Only minus is, that Schama to my opinion is a little too modest about Rembrandt's genius.

Returning to Rembrandt's Eyes: An Appreciation
One of the pleasures of reading books from your own library is that they are always there for return visits.Reading Hockney's 'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters' stimulated this reader to probe more deeply into some of the venerated painters.Simon Schama's fine book REMBRANDT'S EYES is like an old friend, an excellent resource book for facts about Netherlands painting, social and political history that so affected the works of the two featured painters Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, a page-turner novel, and a catalogue of brilliant reproductions of paintings.This book satisfies - even more the second time around!

A hefty book at over 750 pages, there is not a page that Schama does not use his charming style of writing to slowly inform.We learn about the atmosphere into which Rembrandt was born, follow his works from the earliest examples through his entire career, encounter his passion for elegance and his fall into poverty, and understand his envy of the creatively and socially successful Rubens.Not a book of gossip, this, but instead a biography well documented in a fine bibliography (no mean feat for a history of a great man without much written contemporary documentation!) and a survey of illustrations that augment the story as well as any yet written.

For those who hunger for knowledge about a famous painter yet who deign to wade through the usual dry treatise format, welcome to the class with Schama. This is a book that will endure (first printed in 1999 and now available in paperback) because of the stature of the subject AND the stature of the author. Hats off to Simon Schama who so entertainingly and successfully takes us behind Rembrandt's eyes to see his work as few have shown it.Grady Harp, December 06
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"The life Of Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch master painter of magical lights & shadows" is a delightfully written biography of one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Rembrandt was born in Leiden in a period that is called the "Dutch Golden Age" in which trade, science and art in Holland were among the most acclaimed in the world. Rembrandt's greatest creative works were portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. In 1642 he painted the world famous "Night Watch", his largest work and the most notable of the important group portrait commissions which he received. Rembrandt lived beyond his means, buying art, prints and rarities, which probably caused a court arrangement to avoid his bankruptcy in 1656. This comprehensive and enjoyable 1904 classic bestseller tells the fascinating life story of one of the best artists the world has ever known, a true master of lights & shadows on the canvas, Rembrandt van Rijn. ... Read more