A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings: Volumes I-VI

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The Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings is dedicated to the painted works of Rembrandt. It presents a vast amount of meticulous research on Rembrandt’s paintings covering the early years until his later years, and with a special focus on his self-portraits and small-scale history paintings. The main aim of this project was to isolate Rembrandt’s own works from the great volume of Rembrandt-like paintings, produced by his many pupils and followers, sometimes with the involvement of the master himself. As a result, the CORPUS contains examinations of the originals of all works attributed to Rembrandt, with these examinations having taken full advantage of today’s sophisticated techniques including radiography, neutron activation autoradiography, dendrochronology and paint sample analysis. Since the second half of the last century, art historians, realizing that the image of Rembrandt’s work had become blurred with time, have attempted to redefine the artist’s significance both as a source of inspiration to other artists and as a great artist in his own right. Carrying on the work started by previous generations, a group of leading Dutch art historians from the university and museum world joined forces in the late 1960s in order to study afresh the paintings usually ascribed to Rembrandt. The researchers came together in the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP). In the course of the completion of this project and the publication of the six volumes, the composition of the group of researchers changed, and at the same time, the group’s approach changed as a result of art-historical and methodological developments. The changes and developments are reflected in the break in style between volumes III and IV. The first three volumes take a historical and chronological approach. They cover Rembrandt’s early years in Leiden (1629-1631), his first years in Amsterdam (1631-1634), and finally his later years of reputation (1635-1642). The fourth and fifth volume take a thematic approach. Dedicated to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, volume IV looks at the valuation of autograph paintings, at dress and meaning in his self-portraits, and at authenticity and function. Volume V is about the small-scale history and genre paintings, an area considered to be the most challenging assignments for an artist. The volume presents the systematic research into this hitherto little known area, revealing a rich, and often fresh understanding of Rembrandt’s own way of thinking about these basic aspects. Volume VI, the set’s last volume, revisits Rembrandt’s paintings and is both a revisionary critique of the first three volumes and an independent overview. Each volume combines a number of introductory chapters with a full catalogue of all paintings for the given period or theme. In the catalogues, each painting is discussed and examined in a detailed way, comprising a descriptive, an interpretative and a documentary section.