Rembrandt portraits series#

Rembrandt portraits series#

Rembrandt bares his soul in a series of canvases unprecedented in their intensity and candor. They were shown to prospective customers in order to reassure them of the artist's painterly skills, and to act as exemplars for portrait and genre painting commissions.Įspecially in the final self portraits, there is no mask of flattery. Rembrandt always kept several self portraits in stock.

The self portraits were certainly convenient, default subject matter, but they also had a commercial function. No sitter was more readily available than Rembrandt himself, seen through his own looking glass. They were the most complete and accurate record of the physical appearance of any human being prior to the invention of photography. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) painted more than fifty self portraits. It will have all the more impact after having a close encounter with Rembrandt. Move on rapidly to Duchamp's Fountain and Cage's 4'33' '. Rembrandt outlived Hendrickje, who died in 1663. When Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, came to Amsterdam in 1667, he honored Rembrandt with a visit to his home. Next ask a student to erase repeats and rapidly facilitate consolidating what remains to a single set of preliminary bullet points. By 1662 Rembrandt via the new business was fulfilling major commissions for individual portraits, group portraits, and other works. When the time is up, ask a scribe from each trio to record their bullet points on the white board. Limiting yourself to the evidence of the Rembrandt self portraits for now, craft preliminary bullet points for a definition of art. Tell them to work in trios on the following task for a timed 5 minutes: Invite the class to the front of the room, standing close to the screen. Eight Rembrandt self portraits are presented here, spanning Remdrandt's 40+ year career as a master of representational oil painting. The intention of this unit-by referring to a recognized central case of greatness in traditional art-is to provide students with a default base line for meta-thinking about the nature of art. We will not shy away from the extremely slippery problem of differentiating good art from bad. In Duchamp's Fountain and Cage's 4'33' ' and The value of art we will encounter central and marginal cases of artworks that stretch the boundaries and thwart attempts at a singular definition of art.