A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings

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A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings is a catalog raisonné of Rembrandt van Rijn's paintings in six volumes publishedby the Rembrandt Research Project between 1982 and 2015. The original aim was to write off all those paintings wrongly attributed to Rembrandt in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of the previous practice of intuitive assessment by connoisseurs, all write-ups and write-downs of the paintings in question should be based on scientific research.

The depreciation practice of the Rembrandt Research Project was heavily criticized during and after the publication of the first three volumes. In addition, it was shown that the applied methods of dendrochronology and the material analysis of primers and paints did not allow any distinction between Rembrandt's works and those of his students and workshop employees. Write-offs based on scientific investigations were the rare exception, mostly the investigation results only confirmed judgments already made for other reasons.

In 1993 Ernst van de Wetering became head of the Rembrandt Research Project and thus responsible for the fourth and fifth volumes. He attributed a number of the works that had been written off since 1982 to Rembrandt. In the sixth and last volume of the series, published in 2015, the entire work of Rembrandt was presented largely in the style of earlier catalog raisonnés, insofar as van de Wetering considered it authentic.

background

Earlier Rembrandt catalogs of works were based on style-critical and intuitive attributions by recognized Rembrandt experts who did not have to justify their decisions. The first catalog raisonné of the works of Rembrandt was the seventh volume of John Smith's A catalog raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French painters , published in 1836 . Outstanding because of the form of the presentation was Wilhelm Bode 's Rembrandt work, published in eight volumes from 1897 to 1905 . Descriptive directory of his paintings with the heliographic replicas . It had Cornelis Hofstede de Groot already worked, the 1907-1928 ten volumes of his Descriptive and critical catalog of the works of the most prominent Dutch painters of the 17th century presented. The series, the seventh volume of which was dedicated to Rembrandt and Nicolaes Maes , followed, according to him, the model of Smith's catalog raisonné . Hofstede de Groot did an excellent job with the detailed description of provenances. However, he uncritically recorded a large number of works in which Rembrandt's authorship was barely proven or had long been refuted. With Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiners publications under the title Rembrandt. Recovered paintings , Rembrandt's supposed work reached its greatest extent. It was certainly important that the Paris publishers Charles Sedelmeyer (for Wilhelm Bode) and Franz Kleinberger (for Hofstede de Groot) were primarily active as art dealers, while the turn of the century art historians wrote for the art trade.

The catalog of Rembrandt's paintings published by Abraham Bredius in 1935 was the reference for the next 30 years. This was followed in 1968 by Horst Gerson's catalog raisonné and the following year by Gerson's revised third edition of Bredius' catalog. Gerson had already been called an iconoclast because he had copied or at least cast doubt on numerous paintings. The deficiency of all these registers was that they did not allow for a detailed discussion of the author, date, motif, style and provenance of the individual paintings. Rather, the ascription or write-down of a work since the 19th century has been based on the judgment of the author, the connoisseur , whose intuitive assessment was rarely questioned. In 1923, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot had explicitly and successfully argued against the results of scientific studies and for his own connoisseurship. The Rembrandt Research Project , founded by art historians in 1968 , aimed to rid Rembrandt's work of false attributions and to create a catalog raisonné that made a justified attribution or write-off for all works in question. Not the authority of an art historian or connoisseur , but verifiable results of scientific, especially natural science, investigations should be decisive.

history

Initially, in the first three volumes of the five-volume corpus , each painting was sorted into one of three categories. Category A contained those paintings that were considered indubitable and demonstrably genuine. Category C was awarded to works that unquestionably and demonstrably did not come from Rembrandt. In Group C , only those works were initially listed that were already included in Abraham Bredius' catalog raisonné in 1935. Finally paintings that are not reliable as a Rembrandt or non-Rembrandt were recognized in the category B arranged. The selection of works based on Bredius' catalog was already discarded in the second volume, now all the pictures in the catalog by Horst Gerson from 1968 were used as a basis, plus some paintings that were discussed as possible works by Rembrandt in post-war literature.

It soon became apparent that the carrying out of scientific investigations of each individual work and their interpretation by the entire group greatly delayed work on the Corpus . Finally, the original approach of the scientific investigation of all works as the basis of the assessments was abandoned, attributions and depreciations were again primarily based on the style analysis. After the publication of the third volume in 1989, the project was completed for most of the group's employees, as they no longer believed that editing the entire work was possible. The older members withdrew from the project in 1993, but it was to be continued under the direction of Ernst van de Wetering .

Ernst van de Wetering was of the opinion that Rembrandt's late work, which had not yet been edited, was the really interesting part of his oeuvre. Therefore, he wanted to pursue the original plan of a comprehensive catalog raisonné on a scientific basis, but forego the rigid categorization into “Rembrandt”, “Non-Rembrandt” and “indefinite”. In the future, for paintings in public collections, discussions should be sought with the curators before publication, and a small group of scholars from various fields should participate in investigations and evaluations of the paintings. The objective criteria obtained through the investigations, which in themselves often had little informative value, were to be combined to form a coherent overall picture. Van de Wetering followed the view that a painting is not a representation in a certain style. Rather, it is the answer to an artistic challenge developed in a complex creative and manual process.

In the break between the third and fourth volumes, van de Wetering explained in an article the reorientation of the project using a painting newly ascribed to Rembrandt: the Self-Portrait with Flat Hat from 1642 in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle .

The fourth and fifth volumes comprise the groups of self-portraits and small-format history pictures, and some of the paintings previously depicted were already reevaluated in these volumes. Almost one hundred paintings created after 1642, including large-format history pictures, Bible scenes, landscapes and all portraits except the self-portraits, were not shown in the five volumes published. That was about a quarter of the work, which clearly missed the goal of a comprehensive catalog raisonné. Therefore Ernst van de Wetering continued to work, and between 2005 and 2012 visited almost all of Rembrandt's known paintings.

The corpus was completed in 2014 after 46 years of work with the sixth volume, which was published in 2015 and lists all 340 works ascribed to Rembrandt at the time of going to press - and only those. The aim is not to isolate the paintings from one another, but to present them in context and as part of an artistic development. As a result, a new numbering was created, which is a chronology of Rembrandt's painter's life according to the current state of research.

Single volumes

The Flight into Egypt , 1627, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours , copied in the first volume

Volume 1: 1625-1631 (1982)

The first volume in the series covers Rembrandt's Leiden period , after the second part of his training with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, and before the permanent resettlement from his native Leiden to Amsterdam. After the foreword and technical notes, the volume begins with four introductory essays, which cover more than sixty pages with the stylistic development of Rembrandt, his materials and working methods, the value of reproductions in early prints, and Rembrandt's signatures. The catalog section comprises 610 pages with descriptions of 42 paintings in group A that were regarded as authentic , 44 discarded or written off from group C , and seven paintings for which Rembrandt can neither be proven nor excluded as the author (group B ). All paintings are shown, but almost without exception in black and white photos, and almost all paintings are shown with several detailed photos and X-ray and infrared photos. The individual catalog entries in the first three volumes are divided into nine points:

  1. Summarized assessment; a few lines about the authenticity of the painting.
  2. Description of the painting; in the sense of a picture description.
  3. Observations and technical investigation; Date and circumstances of the assessment, including details of the project members involved; Support (wooden board or canvas); Primer; Paint layer; X-ray and infrared images, signature, varnish.
  4. Comments; The project members give a generally unanimous assessment of the painting, classify it in Rembrandt's work and explain relationships to other works;
  5. Documents and sources;
  6. Graphic reproductions;
  7. Copies;
  8. Provenance;
  9. Summary of the results of the investigation.

In the catalog section, eleven works were copied anew, that was a fifth of the holdings from the period up to 1631 attributed to Rembrandt up to then. These included such well-known works as The Flight to Egypt , An Old Scholar in a Vault and The Interest Dime . The first two, a number of other works in group C , and all seven works in group B , have meanwhile been ascribed to Rembrandt again.

Volume 2: 1631-1634 (1986)

The second volume of the Corpus only includes works from three and a half years, from Rembrandt's move to Amsterdam to 1634, the year of his marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh . This volume begins with an introduction with six essays which is even more extensive than the first volume. It covers the stylistic features of Rembrandt's portraits from the 1630s, the canvases, problems with the training of students and the workshop, patrons and early buyers, and the signatures from 1632 to 1634.

By a catalog of 720 pages describes 62 as genuine recognized paintings, 38 losses and a doubt the group B . The appendix with addenda and corrigenda to the first volume is quite extensive; it covers 15 of the works described in the first volume on more than 20 pages, sometimes with small corrections and additions. It also contains an addendum to a work that should have belonged in the first volume and a copy.

Volume 3: 1635-1642 (1986)

The third volume covers the period from 1635 to 1642 and closes with Rembrandt's The Night Watch . As in the second volume, Horst Gerson's catalog raisonné formed the basis for the selection of the paintings discussed. After the essay of the second volume on the style of portraits, the third volume begins with an essay on the style of the history paintings of the 1630s. This is followed by contributions by Josua Bruyn on Rembrandt's workshop and the signatures from 1635 to 1642. Overall, the introductory essays are given significantly less space in this volume.

The catalog, with more than 700 pages, includes 42 paintings that have been assessed as authentic, one of which was not named by Gerson. Of four cases of doubt in Group B , two were not included in Gerson's work, plus forty paintings rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project.

The third volume responded to the fact that the original assessment of the paintings according to scientific criteria was only of limited significance. A confirmation that the base, primer and paints fit in with Rembrandt's time, or that the wood came from the same tree and the canvas from the same roll as a verifiably genuine “Rembrandt”, still left the possibility open that it was just that Work of an employee of the workshop acted. More emphasis was placed on traditional style criticism, especially to distinguish Rembrandt's own works from those in his workshop.

Self-Portrait with a Neck , c. 1629, Germanisches Nationalmuseum , Nuremberg, in the fourth volume ascribed to Rembrandt

Volume 4: The Self-Portraits (2005)

The fourth volume appeared sixteen years apart and begins again with extensive essays. The first discusses the significance of the “handwritten” paintings in the 17th century, followed by a treatise on Rembrandt's clothing on his self-portraits and their meaning. On more than 200 pages, van de Wetering presents problems of the authenticity and function of Rembrandt's self-portraits. Karin Groen writes about the primers in Rembrandt's workshop and among his contemporaries, and ends with biographical information for the period from 1642 to 1669.

The extensive essays do not even leave 300 pages for the catalog, of which almost fifty pages are additions and corrections to the first three volumes. The structure of the catalog entries was streamlined in the fourth and fifth volumes by combining the first three points into an introduction and description and the last point of the summary was omitted. The volume contains the descriptions of 29 self-portraits not yet dealt with in the three previous volumes. Among the corrections, the self-portrait with a necklace stands out, the supposed copy of which in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum was upgraded to the original at the expense of the version in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Indianapolis Museum of Art suffered the same fate with its self-portrait with a beret .

Volume 5: The Small-Scale History Paintings (2011)

The first introductory essay tries to reconstruct Rembrandt's art theory on almost 140 pages. The second essay with almost 120 pages undertakes a chronology and investigation of Rembrandt's small-format history pictures, including paintings, engravings and a selection of the drawings. Eight paintings copied from earlier volumes are recognized as Rembrandt again, and two paintings that have not been discussed so far are attributed to Rembrandt. Three significantly shorter essays deal with Rembrandt's prototypes and the copies, variants or “satellites” painted after them by his students, the quality and Rembrandt's visual memory, and Rembrandt's paintings with the participation of other painters.

The more than 320 pages of the essays are followed by a slightly more extensive catalog in which thirty paintings are discussed. This time the correction part is tight and is limited to a list of the eight attributions and the two newly identified paintings from the second essay.

Volume 6: Rembrandt's paintings revisited. A complete survey (2015)

The sixth volume provides an overview of the entire painterly work of Rembrandt as it appears after more than forty years of research by the Rembrandt Research Project. While Christian Tümpel only named 280 authentic works by Rembrandt in his catalog raisonné from 1986, 340 paintings are now listed again. The difference is not based on new discoveries, of which there were only a few, but on a changed assessment of well-known paintings.

Like the first five volumes, this one begins with essays, this time two by Ernst van de Wetering. The much larger one with more than fifty pages is entitled What is a Rembrandt? A personal account , the second asks What is a non-Rembrandt? This is followed by 410 pages with tables and biographical notes, with the paintings sorted chronologically. The division takes place according to Rembrandt's life phases in one Leiden and three Amsterdam periods, and two phases of his later work. The pictorial section is followed by around 200 pages with notes on the tables, which in many of the works already described in the earlier volumes only comprise a few lines, and which in the case of the new paintings also extend over a few pages.

Ernst van de Wetering attributed the increase in the number of authentically recognized paintings to the fact that his predecessors tried to clean up Rembrandt's work. Sometimes they followed poor arguments for a write-off. As a work that was largely created by a single author, with the greatly reduced scope of the descriptions and the secondary scientific investigations of the paintings, the sixth volume again comes close to the traditional catalog raisonné as the work of a single connoisseur .

reception

Bust of an Old Woman , 1630/1631, Royal Collection , Windsor Castle , Rembrandt or Jan Lievens

The publications of the individual volumes of the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings were each noted with great attention and caused a sensation far beyond the professional world. The rigorous depreciation practice of the Rembrandt Research Project led the London Guardian and The New York Times to write of "blood on the canvas" and the Rembrandt Research Project to refer to it as the "Amsterdam Mafia". Then the art historian and writer Anthony Bailey jumped up and quoted Julius Held : “Are these people blind?” In 1991, the art historian Gary Schwartz criticized the Rembrandt Research Project for insufficient consideration of historical documents. He was referring to the painting Bust of an Old Woman in Windsor Castle , which is still referred to as the original in the first volume of the Corpus and ascribed to Jan Lievens in the second volume . Another point of criticism was the inconsistent evaluation of the pentimenti , which were sometimes accepted as an authenticity feature and sometimes rejected.

Peter Schatborn welcomed the high quality of the illustrations, but a number of them were too dark. But he would have liked more detailed shots and colored images. Schatborn pointed to the naming of the authors in the individual descriptions and to the minority opinions of Ernst van de Wetering. He was representing an individual opinion, mostly criticized by his colleagues that anonymity as part of a group gave the members of the Rembrandt Research Project a security that made the numerous write-offs possible in the first place.

A review of the first volume in the November 1983 editorial of Burlington Magazine highlighted the in-depth study of the paintings. The descriptions of individual works were preceded by a summary because of their size. The attention to detail goes so far as to carry out an extensive discussion for Rembrandt's The Artist in his studio in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts , where the studio shown was located. On the one hand, the reviewer saw that the presentation of all the facts should enable the reader to understand the arguments for and against an attribution to Rembrandt and to actively participate in the discussion. On the other hand, high quality photographs would remove much of the descriptions, with more illustrations and less text making the reader's job easier. The price for the wealth of information is an uncomfortably heavy volume.

The art historian Christopher White criticized the extremely verbose depiction of each individual painting. The detailed descriptions of the primers and coats of paint only gave the impression that they were based on a scientific basis. The effort to reproduce subtle nuances of the expressions of opinion of individual members of the Rembrandt Research Project leads to verbose and often repetitive descriptions, each with its own foreword and a summary before and after. Shorter descriptions would have made the arguments stand out more clearly, saved space and thus significantly accelerated the whole project. Taking Festina lente too literally is a dangerous concept, given the limited human lifespan.

In the cases of controversial attributions, the lack of a summary of the opinions previously presented in art historical literature in favor of or against a work was criticized. Where there is no precise date of purchase, it would be useful to provide an estimate of the date of purchase or the period of ownership. One example is Samson and Delilah , whose attribution to Rembrandt or Lievens has been controversial since 1956, and for which no sufficiently precise information about the purchase by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam is given. It is positively noted that the information on scientific investigations of the substrate, be it wood or canvas, primer and paint layer is novel in scope for a catalog raisonné. This is followed by the analysis of X-ray and infrared images, usually accompanied by corresponding images, which is also new for such a work.

The rigid categorization aroused displeasure among art historians with regard to the copied works. The compulsion to decide whether a work is from Rembrandt or not leads to equal treatment of works from Rembrandt's workshop, pastiches and forgeries in the case of depreciation . This does not do justice to the workshop practice of the 17th century, which not only made it possible, but also required a master to sign the work of his students and employees and pass them off as his work. On the one hand, this was due to the fact that the “hand of the master” was less important than the “spirit of the master”; a design devised by Rembrandt and executed by a student was still a “Rembrandt”. However, inventories of the 17th century made a clear distinction between “Rembrandt” and “after Rembrandt”.

Since the first volume, the project team has preferred alternative ascriptions to the mere statement that a painting is not a Rembrandt. As a result, there were a large number of attributions to Jan Lievens and Rembrandt's pupils, including Ferdinand Bol , Gerard Dou , Carel Fabritius and Isaac de Jouderville . This in turn led to the accusation that other standards were applied to Rembrandt's works than to the supposed works of his students.

Christopher White pointed out that on the occasion of its exhibition Art in the Making, which was held from 1988 to 1989 , the London National Gallery thoroughly examined two works and identified them as Rembrandt originals, which were copied entirely in the third volume of the Corpus ( Portrait of Petronella Buys ) or parts of which are said to have been in a different hand ( portrait of Philips Lucasz. ). White expressed the hope that other museums would follow the example of the National Gallery and critically examined the assessments of their paintings published in the Corpus .

On the occasion of the numerous events for Rembrandt's 400th birthday in 2006, Christopher Brown reviewed the newly published fourth volume and referred to its three predecessors. While in the first volumes an overly rigorous approach of reduction was pursued, the fourth volume is characterized by the generous inclusion. Overall, the Rembrandt Research Project has been the driving force of Rembrandt research for many years, and much more recent research has been in the form of approving or disapproving responses to the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings . Some of the exhibitions during the Rembrandt Year were exercises in reclaiming works by Rembrandt that were copied in the first three volumes of the Corpus . This process of renewed attribution of works by the curators of exhibitions took place in 2001 with the Kassel exhibition Der Junge Rembrandt. The mystery of its beginnings has begun, with the group shown as a work by Rembrandt in an interior of the National Gallery of Ireland .

Volumes

  • Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. I. 1625-1631. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague / Boston / London 1982, ISBN 90-247-2764-2 .
  • this: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. II. 1631-1634. Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht / Boston / Lancaster 1986, ISBN 90-247-3340-5 .
  • this: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. III. 1635-1642. Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht / Boston / London 1989, ISBN 90-247-3782-6 .
  • this: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. IV. The self-portraits. Springer, Dordrecht 2005, ISBN 1-4020-3280-3 .
  • this: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. V. The Small-Scale History Paintings. Springer, Dordrecht 2011, ISBN 978-1-4020-4607-0 .
  • this: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI. Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited. A Complete Survey. Springer Science + Business Media, Dordrecht 2015, ISBN 978-94-017-9173-1 .

Web links

Commons : A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI  - Album of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Josua Bruyn and others: Preface . Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. I. 1625-1631 , pp. IX-XXIII
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Anonymus: The Rembrandt Research Project. In: The Burlington Magazine 1983, Volume 125, No. 968, pp. 660-663, JSTOR 881379 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Katarzyna Krzyżagórska-Pisarek: Corpus Rubenianum versus Rembrandt Research Project. Two approaches to a catalog raisonné. In: Rocznik Historii Sztuki. Volume 41, 2016, pp. 23-50, doi: 10.11588 / diglit.34225.5 .
  4. ^ Anonymus: Rembrandt in the revision , Der Spiegel . No. 10, 1983, pp. 204-208, accessed November 3, 2019.
  5. ↑ a b c Anonymous: The Rembrandt re-trial. In: The Burlington Magazine. 1992, volume 134, no. 1070, p. 285, JSTOR 881379 .
  6. ↑ a b Christopher White Amsterdam and London. Rembrandt. In: The Burlington Magazine. Volume 134, No. 1069, 1992, pp. 264-268, JSTOR 885146 .
  7. ↑ a b c The Rembrandt Research Project is complete . Springer Science + Business Media website , October 13, 2014, accessed November 3, 2019.
  8. ↑ a b Josua Bruyn et al: The Rembrandt Research Project. In: The Burlington Magazine. 1993, volume 135, no. 1081, p. 279, JSTOR 885518 .
  9. ^ A b Ernst van de Wetering: The Rembrandt Research Project. In: The Burlington Magazine. Volume 135, No. 1088, 1993, pp. 764-765, JSTOR 885822 .
  10. ^ Ernst van de Wetering and Paul Broekhoff: New Directions in the Rembrandt Research Project, Part I: The 1642 Self-Portrait in the Royal Collection. In: The Burlington Magazine. Volume 138, No. 1116, 1996, pp. 174-180, JSTOR 887058 .
  11. ↑ a b Peter Schatborn: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, deel I, 1625-1631 by J. Bruyn, B. Haak, SH Levie, PJJ van Thiel and E. vd Wetering. In: Oud Holland. Volume 100, No. 1, 1986, pp. 55-63, JSTOR 42711206 .
  12. ^ A b Christopher White: Book Review: A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Vol. II (1631-34). In: The Burlington Magazine. Volume 129, No. 1017, 1987, pp. 809-810, JSTOR 883180 .
  13. ↑ a b A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings Volume VI: Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited - A Complete Survey presented , Website CODART, October 8, 2014, accessed on November 3, 2019.
  14. ↑ Ernst van de Wetering: "I'll forget about prices right away". The mirror. No. 47, 1997, pp. 258f, accessed on November 3, 2019.
  15. ↑ a b Edward Grasman: The Rembrandt Research Project: reculer pour mieux sauter. In: Oud Holland - Journal for Art of the Low Countries. 1999, Volume 113, No. 3, pp. 153-160, doi: 10.1163 / 187501799X00463 .
  16. ↑ Ernst van de Wetering: Negenduizendvierhonderdachtentwintig Rembrandt; The criteria from the Rembrandt Research Project . In: NRC Handelsblad . December 13, 1991. Retrieved November 3, 2019.
  17. ↑ Christopher Brown: The Rembrandt Year. In: The Burlington Magazine. 2007, Volume 149, No. 1247, pp. 104-108, JSTOR 20074724 .