Spaightwood Galleries

For Rembrandt and his friends, students, and follwers, there often seems to be a direct connection between drawing and printmaking. Artists like Ferdinand Bol, Govaert Flinck, Jan Lievens, Jan Joris van Vliet, and Pieter de With, are fluent draftsmen and often excellent printmakers as well. While the Counter Reformation held sway in the south, in the north, in Holland and Zeeland, Jesus, the Apostles, and their predecessrs in the Old Testament, walk the same ground that burghers, beggars, farmers, and peasants tred, work the same fields, trying to coexist with nature and yet to wrest it to their needs.

Very select bibliography: Marian Bosanz-Prakken, Rembrandt and His Time: Masterworks from the Albertina (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2005); Hans-Martin Rotermund, Rembrandts's Drawings and Etchings for the Bible, trans. Shierry M. Weber (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969); Seymour Slive, Drawings of Rembrandt, 2 vols. (NY: Dover. 1965); Jeroen Giltaij, The Drawings by Rembrandt and his school in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1988); Walter Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols. (NY: Abaris Books, 1979-1992).