(Ebook) Rembrandt's Eyes by Schama, Simon ISBN 9781422151860, 1422151867, 8601422151862

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 again. Returning to the bustling Dutch world with which he first made his reputation in his bestselling The Embarrassment of Riches
(1987), Schama recreates Rembrandt's life and times with all the verve
and panache of a historical novelist, whilst 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 embedded skilfully in a richer and denser
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
Habsburgs 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 artistically
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
rise 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, lavishly illustrated throughout
in full colour, with double-page colour spreads of the most memorable of
Rembrandt's works, which take one's breath away as one turns the page.
But above all, this is narrative history at its very best, a page-turner
and an adventure story, which will make the reader laugh and cry by
turns, in the time-honoured tradition of masterly writing. --Lisa Jardine