Tag: Rembrandt van Rijn
The artist from behind
What’s happening when artists choose to portray themselves in their work? The self-portrait was an invention of the Renaissance, but it’s just as common today, in painting (Jenny Saville’s work, now on show in a big retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, is a striking example) and in many other forms. Perhaps the most famous […]
The assassin waits
In my lockdown tour of Europe I’m still enjoying my virtual stay in the city of Delft. I’ve walked a little way from the Nieuwe Kerk to the Prinsenhof in Sint Agathaplein. Today the Prinsenhof is a museum, and a very good one, but in the late sixteenth century it was the government headquarters of […]
Carel Fabritius’s ‘A view of Delft’
You can take a train to Delft – or you could, in pre-Virus times – walk to the corner of Oude Langendijk and the Oosteinde in the city centre, look to the north-west, and see what the painter Carel Fabritius saw there on a bright summer’s day in 1652. A few things have changed, it’s […]
Anselm Kiefer and Rembrandt van Rijn
Visit the big retrospective of Anselm Kiefer in the Royal Academy and it’s unlikely that you’ll quickly forget it. Which is apt, because memory, personal and especially collective, is the big theme that runs through all his work since he began his career as an artist in 1969. For Kiefer memory is seldom direct or […]