Woman Carrying a Child Down Stairs by Rembrandt, ca. 1636, pen and brown ink with brown wash, 73/8x53/16 Collection Morgan Library, New York, New York. "With simple gestures, movements, and expressions, Rembrandt captured the dignity of everyday life - here, a tender moment between mother and child," says Eitel-Porter, "though his portrayal is anything but ordinary."
"He was an heir to Leonardo in that he was always sketching from nature," Rubenstein says of Rembrandt van Rijn (16o6~1669). "His gestures were so true and full of life."If Rubens was the painter of power and the royal court, Rembrant was the artist of humanity. Gifted with the same ability with line, the Dutch painter and drafts-man had the skill to draw very quickly and to confidently add simple washes that efficiently established dark-light patterns. The unforgiving medium of ink was no hindrance to Rembrandt's pursuit of the moment's action; the back of his wife's robe sweeps convincingly off the stair in Mother Carrying a Child Down Stairs, for instance. Mothers and children were of special interest to the artist perhaps, in part, because he lost three children in their infancy and his wife's death cut short a happy marriage."The humanity of his drawings...you don't feel it so pervasively in the work of anybody else," remarks Rubenstein. "He seems to know what the mother feels like, what the child feels like - what's going on in the scene. And he has a spontaneous, incredible line that could show the structure of something, and yet it has its own calligraphic sense."
Resources Rembrandt's Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, by Clifford S. Ackley (MFA Publications, Boston, Massachusetts) The Drawings by Rembrandt and His School, Vol. I, by Jeroen Giltaij (Thames & Hudson, New York, New York) Drawings by Rembrandt and His School, Vol. II, by Jeroen Giltaij (Thames & Hudson, New York, New York)
A Peasant in a High Cap, Standing Leaning on a Stick by Rembrandt, 1639, etching in black ink on cream laid paper, 25/8 x 111/16. Collection The Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. "He understood the blind man, the king, the mother, the child - that's what makes Rembrandt so Shakespearean," says Rubenstein.
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