Rembrandt and His Time: Masterworks from The Albertina

This is a catalogue of an exhibition of Dutch Master Drawings to celebrate the 400 th anniversary of Rembrandt''s birth.The drawings all come from one of the greatest collections of Drawings and Prints- this is the Albertina in Vienna.They have developed an understanding with the Milwaukee Art Museum for future exhibitions- given the very high quality of the Drawings and Prints in the Albertina the people in Milwaukee and those that travel to Milwaukee are in for a series of treatsThis exhibition is devoted to Dutch drawing around the time of Rembrandt (. 1606-1667)The chapter titles areEarly Genre and LandscapeRembrandtMid- century Figures,Genre and PortraitureMid -century Landscape and TopographyMarine and Italianate LandscapeStill LifeThere are 18 master drawings by Rembrandt ( The Albertina has some 40 original Rembrandt drawings ( there may be more-- I don't read German so am going on a vague comment I read ) there is 1 school drawing -related to a print in the exhibition,and there are 8 prints in total. This is a very generous showing of Rembrandt by a single overseas institution. Yes you will see more in London when the British Museum showed its Rembrandt's to its home audience, the same case can be made for Amsterdam,or Berlin or some other big collections (I only read English) but the point is this is an overseas exhibition.All drawings are very light sensitive and only come out on exhibition then disappear from public view for a variable length of time. When you have very famous Rembrandt's like The Albertina or the British Museum or the Print Room in the Rijksmuseum then you get a lot of requests for drawings for many Rembrandt exhibitions so you have to limit you loans to cover the many loan requests. The people of Milwaukee were lucky to see so many Rembrandt drawingsInappropriate Title, or Hype. ( I think one of the other reviewers is off the mark)For a comparison, The Pierpont Morgan Library have some 24 Rembrandt's in there big academic catalogue that gives full details on their Dutch Drawing Collection. The Morgan is likely to have the largest Rembrandt drawing collection in America."Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan LibrarySeventeenth to Nineteenth Century"Jane S Turner. 2 volumes 2006 ( this includes some but not all of the promised Gifts from the Thaw CollectionThe Getty , and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard also have good collections ( The Abrams Collection is promised to the Fogg, several of there Rembrandt's may already be in the collection.My apologies for any mistakes, living in New Zealand it is differcult to keep up to date with the movement of Promised Gifts into collectionsMajor European collections of Rembrandt drawings tend to be 50 plusRemember in the 1950's it was thought there were some 1400 Rembrandt drawings, Nowdays , with much patient scholarship the number is down to around 800.The point are two.Drawing collections run at about 50 plus in the big European collections and at around 20 drawings in the large US collections.A loan of 18 drawings from a singe institution is very generous indeed.The title to me seems very reasonable- it commemorated the 400 th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth and there was a reasonable showing of Rembrandt's work.This is an excellent exhibition catalogue showing work by many important Dutch Artists. The Drawings are beautifully reproduced in colour and the text is helpful ,if at times a bit technical. If you like the Dutch golden age then you will like this book The Great Masters of the Albertina . Is an excellent large book on many of the Albertina's treasuresThere is another Albertina exhibition of Dutch 17th century drawings[[ASIN:088397116X Drawings from the Albertina: Landscape in the Age of Rembrandt]

Rembrandt is central to the works in focus only, but his work may not have had an influence on most of the artists here and is perhaps a major factor, but not the central one, in the evolution of the style(s) dealt with here.The works are reproduced well and the text, by an expert in the field is done with erudition.The text is not always successful at specifying the fine differences between art works.As a survey and a review of an exhibit, it is a wonderful work. And the title was probably important for marketing the exhibition that this is based upon.I would have preferred a title such as Seventeenth Century Dutch Masterworks from the Albertina (with special reference to Rembrandt[?]), though this may have diminished the marketability of the work.

Good reproductions in colour