Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one of the greatest painters of all time. His work — as painter, draughtsman and etcher — continues to fascinate and move us like none other. He has been the subject of innumerable books, from novels to weighty volumes of art-historical analysis and argument, and even some films (remember Charles Laughton as the heavily moustachioedartist?). Now we are offered a book which deals specifically with his early years, attempting to explain how the young man became an Old Master.
It is heavily illustrated, with 100 colour photographs placed throughout the text, in a neat, reader-friendly format. Unfortunately, at least three full-page digital images have been enlarged beyond their capacity, resulting in an ugly break-up of legibility. Pushkin Press, however, is not known for its quality art publications, and Young Rembrandt is really a historical memoir of the city of Leiden, written by a Dutch author seeking to explain the artist through the context of his native city.
In his prologue, Onno Blom writes that, given the almost total absence of documentation about the young Rembrandt, he has had to construct his biography from what he saw about him every day.‘I built my sentences from the stones of my city,’ he writes, and follows this statement with a map of Leiden in 1633. Thus we are given readily available details about life in 17th-century Holland concerning burial rites, plague victims, the obligations of the civic militias, city renovation and the influx of immigrant workers to bolster the cloth trade. But Blom has to accept that Rembrandt may never have made a drawing of the city, though we know he drew the country around Amsterdam when he moved there.
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