#abraham bredius

[yourdailyqueer]

Abraham Bredius (deceased)

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Gay

DOB: 18 April 1855  

RIP: 13 March 1946

Ethnicity: White - Dutch

Occupation: Art collector, art historian, museum curator

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REMBRANDT, or The Inconsistencies

Rembrandt changed his painting style repeatedly over his career, developing his late, “rough” style in the early 1650s. The transition from one style to the next, one imagines, would have involved a certain amount of experimentation, and the pictures painted during the transitional periods are likely to exhibit some inconsistencies and anomalies with respect to the residual and emergent styles.

Josua Bruyn, a founding member of the Rembrandt Research Project from 1969 to 1993, assumed that, apart from the transitional periods, consistency could be assumed. The methodology he imposed on the RRP was “dominated by the idea that Rembrandt’s way of painting changed from one period to another, but very largely remained uniform within those periods, in which there occurred no radical variations”

Ernst van de Wetering, the only member of the Rembrandt Research Project from 1993 to its conclusion in 2014, challenged Bruyn’s theory of periods of consistency with an inconsistent career in the final volume of the Rembrandt Research Project’s published corpus, Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey: “There is no such thing as a typical Rembrandt; each painting is unusual in its own way ... the dating of a picture based, to whatever extent, on the possibility of a predictable stylistic development within Rembrandt’s late œuvre, is perhaps best ignored.”

Van der Wetering’s acceptance of stylistic inconsistencies within transitional works led to the re-attribution of the Old Man in an Armchair (1652) to Rembrandt. Acquired for the National Gallery of Art in 1957 as an autograph work, the picture was demoted in 1969 to a “follower” of Rembrandt by Horst Gerson on account of observed inconsistencies within the picture itself. Despite Van der Wetering’s reassessment, the National Gallery conservators, who are perhaps the best in the business, have declined to give the picture back to Rembrandt, citing the differences in brushwork used in the hands and point to the use of pure pigments in the robe as “unusual” for Rembrandt.

Controversial pictures taken from Rembrandt, such as the mutilated Saul and David in the Mauritshuis or the Man with a Golden Helmet, have been generally attributed to students in the artist’s workshop. Research concerning Rembrandt’s studio has unearthed a wealth of information which has ironically made attributions more difficult. Rembrandt’s teaching methods were highly unusual. Students were encouraged not to duplicate the master’s works, but to develop subjects of their own invention similar to his in tone and content, and then execute them in his style. Rembrandt scholars have traditionally insisted that the artist rarely collaborated with his students, and yet several paintings retouched by the master are described in the 1656 inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions: six are listed as being “retouched by Rembrandt” and two as being “painted over again by Rembrandt.”

Signatures are not conclusive evidence of authenticity. Guild regulations required the master to sign his name on student productions destined for the market. Over 700 paintings survive bearing his name, the majority of which are clearly student productions. Some of the signatures were forged by dealers over the centuries and still others have been retouched by restorers. And yet The Man with a Golden Helmet was rejected on grounds of signature inconsistency.

Rembrandt’s contemporaries would be baffled by modern assertions that pictures with Rembrandt-like subjects devised by a workshop assistants, painted in the master’s signature style, and retouched, where necessary,and signed by the master himself, are not by Rembrandt.

[capxfalcon]

Han van Meegeren

In 1947, Han van Meegeren, a Dutch dude had to prove to the court that he had forged Vermeer with such talent that the entire art world had been fooled by them.

So basically, Hav van Meegeren couldn't sell his own painting. So, he decided to become a forger bc duh??

He spent SIX years perfecting his Vermeer forgeries. He mixed his own paint after researching what all was available when Vermeer was alive, he made his own brushes, he bought 17th century canvases and he baked his paintings so that they could appear dry and cracked. Oh! He also applied a coat of synthetic resin on his art to make the paintings appear older. Yup, he went the full mile.

Now, once he was sure he had perfected his forgeries, he was like, "Oh damn I remember reading that Vermeer had an early period when he dabbled in religious paintings influenced by Caravaggio." Guess what his next step was?

He made a painting. "The Supper at Emmaus"

And guess what?

It passed off for a true Vermeer! Abraham Bredius, the leading authority on Vermeer saw it and was like "Holy smokes, this is the masterpiece of Vermeer's œuvre". In 1937, it sold at a what would be equivalent to $4 million dollars today.

He sold a lot many other "originals" as well. But coming to the Nazi occupation of Netherlands. Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's top generals, bought an "original" Vermeer from van Meegeren.

However, when the Allied powers defeated the Nazis, van Meegeren was put on trial for colluding with the Nazis and selling a national treasure to a Nazi. Damn.

Anyways, then, van Meegeren was like, "My, dudes, no. These are all forgeries. I'm so amazing that even Bredius didn't realise they were fake."

And Bredius -who needed to save his name- was trying to prove the paintings were the real deal. So, in the end, with no option other than a death penalty left, van Meegeren forged another "original" Vermeer in court. This helped prove all of the paintings he had sold to Göring and passed off as "original" Vermeers were actually forged by him and he got imprisoned for a year for fraud.

Art history is on another plane of existence y'all.

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راهنمای جامع سفر به لاهه(بخش سوم)

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REMBRANDT BY THE NUMBERS

1830: English art dealer John Smith estimates the number of paintings by Rembrandt to be 614, a large number for a 17thc. artist, but plausible given the size of Rembrandt’s workshop.

1913: Dutch art historian and curator Cornelis De Groot puts the number of Rembrandt paintings up to 988. The improbable number is indicative of the high number of paintings erroneously or falsely attributed to the painter.

1914: American art historian John C. Van Dyck reduces De Groot’s number to just 48 autograph works.

1935: Dutch art historian and curator Abraham Bredius sets the Rembrandt canon at 639.

1968: Dutch art historian Horst Gerson publishes a revised version of Bredius’ catalogue raisonnée, reducing the number to 420.

2014: After 46 years of research into the corpus of works attributed to Rembrandt, the Rembrandt Research Project’s final volume accepts 348 paintings as authentic works from the master’s hand.

The work of no other old master has been studied more closely than that of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

The Frick Collection’s Polish Rider (c. 1655) was attributed to Rembrandt for centuries until a member of the RRP excluded it from the canon. The Frick maintained the attribution to Rembrandt. Scholarly opinion was initially adamantly opposed to the deattribution, but had finally come to agree with the the RRP’s verdict, when that group reversed its decision and adjudged the painting to be authentic in 2011.