Rembrandt (Drawing Gallery Series) Book

The Louvre has one of the world's largest collections of drawings by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), the great Dutch master who was not only an extraordinary painter and etcher, but also an unrivaled draughtsman in a wide variety of genres. Most of the themes of his drawings are represented in the Louvre collection: Biblical and mythical subjects as well as figure studies, genre scenes, landscapes, portraits and remarkable drawings after Mughal miniatures from India. Rembrandt employed a broad array of techniques and materials in these varied drawings.

French collectors have been interested in Rembrandt's drawings since the early eighteenth century. Although the Louvre's collection began with a few autograph sheets confiscated from émigrés at the end of the eighteenth century, most of the works in the collection are due to several large donations, the most important of which were made by Léon Bonnat in 1919 and Edmond de Rothschild in 1935.

Rembrandt's greatness lies in his highly individual style and his consummate skill in portraying character. The style of his drawings, etchings and paintings evolved constantly throughout his active life as an artist, from 1625 to 1669, which explains the marked differences between works produced in successive periods of his career. The Louvre's collection certainly reflects the great diversity of his graphic art but it also brings out constants in his drawings and incidentally in his paintings and etchings, notably his immense power of evocation combined with a judicious selection of what truly characterized the subject and a striking and acute rendering of human feelings, even in the smallest formats.

Major research into the authenticity of the works attributed to Rembrandt is still in progress, so some current attributions may be challenged in the future; this could obviously apply to some of the drawings from the Louvre presented here.