Art & Travel Blog



Art & Travel Blog

Writing about my thoughts on art and travel has been helpful for me. It has been nice to try to write, as a break from working on some paintings that are due in about a month.

I think I have gone off course, in some of the blog entries, getting into political and cultural issues about which I am interested, but that I do not know enough about. I am concerned that my speculation has caused offense. I find it easy to get carried away with a thought sometimes, and forget that I am a tourist, not a local, outside of the US. My mission going forward is to write more directly from my own experience making and looking at art. I would also like to make occasional reference to my travel experiences, to enjoy and share my recollection of a few places that I have been fortunate enough to visit.


Study after Young Man in a Pearl Trimmed Cap, by a student in Rembrandt’s workshop, possibly Samuel van Hoogstraten. This is another painting from Rembrandt’s workshop, from the 1650’s, in the collection of the State Art Museum in Copenhagen.

Like the work in yesterday’s blog post, this painting looks like a mid- to late-career Rembrandt at first glance. But after looking at it for awhile, it seems to me to be more studied, perhaps cautious, than a work by his teacher.

Here is a link to a reproduction of the painting:
http://www.smk.dk/en/explore-the-art/search-smk/#/detail/KMSsp467

Van Hoogstraten’s painting portrays a competent, reasonably confident young man. The work feels significantly different from the introspective portrait by Drost.

Here is a link to yesterday's portrait by Drost:
http://www.smk.dk/en/explore-the-art/search-smk/#/detail/KMS388

There has been extensive study in recent years by the Rembrandt Research Project, to determine actual authorship of a wide body of paintings once thought to be by Rembrandt. Collectors wanted their old, dark Dutch painting to be a Rembrandt, to make it more valuable, so paintings like van Hoogstraten’s were attributed to the master.

Clearing up that misrepresentation has been helpful. Differences among all those paintings of his students confused the historical understanding of Rembrandt’s character and achievement. It is nicer to see Rembrandt, and each of his students, recognized as the individual artists that they were.

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