Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
Portrait of the Artist as a Paradox
By Ernst Gombrich
Rembrandt's Eyes
by Simon Schama
Knopf, 750 pp., $50.00
Under the title Rembrandt by Himself, the National Gallery of London (sponsored by Thames and Hudson) last summer mounted an exhibition—later moved to The Hague—of painted and etched self-portraits by the Dutch master extending from his early years in Leiden to the last years of his life. There can have been few visitors who were not tempted to seek in this series the reflection of the poignant story of the miller's son rising to fame and fortune in Amsterdam only to end his life as a ruined but undefeated grand old man who recorded the traces of aging with merciless objectivity. If the informative essays assembled in the catalog have aroused their desire to know more of the setting in which this tragedy unfolded, they must have welcomed the news that Simon Schama, the author of a widely read account of the Golden Age of Holland, The Embarrassment of Riches, had turned his attention to Rembrandt in a book which he called Rembrandt's Eyes.
Review, 3930 words
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