Lives of Rembrandt

This publication presents three very different biographies of Rembrandt by contemporaries. An introduction by Charles Ford situates these biographies in the context of 17th-century appreciation of art, and the trajectory of Rembrandt’s career.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (c.1606-1669) was the most talked-about painter of the 17th-century – and quite possibly of the following centuries too. His prodigious talent, extraordinary emotional truth, and reckless disregard of artistic convention astonished, delighted and often dismayed his contemporaries; and the full gamut of these reactions is revealed in the three early biographies published here for the first time in their entirety in English. Sandrart, a German painter and writer on painting, actually knew Rembrandt in Amsterdam; Baldinucci, also an artist contemporary with Rembrandt, was one of the greatest early connoisseurs of prints; and Arnold Houbraken, who studied under some of Rembr