Rembrandt: The Painter at Work

"I made my selection to show that there are many different books analysing so many aspects of the life and the works of Rembrandt. Van de Wetering is one of my mentors and was an authority in my own work on the young Rembrandt, but moreover, he has spent more than 50 years studying the artist. He has accounted for every dot of paint and every panel. I’m a storyteller, whereas Wetering’s work is scientific. Van de Wetering looks at Rembrandt almost as an alchemist . . . He’s looking at the technical aspects of Rembrandt’s oeuvre, which is downright fascinating. And he does so with incredible style. Wetering is a terrific writer. The Painter at Work is such a compelling book because it’s so concrete. There’s a great sense of materiality about a lot of what he describes. He talks about the materials, the palette, the very pigments that Rembrandt was using, the varnishes and even the medium in which the pigments were suspended—some of which will be surprising in our day and age of industrially manufactured paints. Back in the day, painters had to improvise, mixing unlikely ingredients like eggs and nut oils to get the effects they were after. The craft of making paints was a key part of being an artist. “When you’re writing about Rembrandt, you have to be a detective.” So, there’s this great sense materiality here, and in analysing these artistic artefacts, Van de Wetering also deploys some incredibly sophisticated techniques, using X-rays, infrared light to examine what lies below the surface. All of which are beautifully illustrated in this book. All these details–about the canvas, the palette, the brushwork—they all come together as more than the sum of their parts to create the mystery Rembrandt. Van de Wetering understands this process better than other historians, because he is a painter himself. He was educated as a painter and became a professor in art history. Although he’s maybe the most famous Rembrandt scholar in the world, he looks closely at these works trying to understand how they were made, as a painter trying to understand the work of a master painter. You can sense that because Van de Wetering studied him so closely for so many years, he can think like Rembrandt himself. This gives his writing a unique and fascinating perspective."