Anyone who has read Dear Theo, the book of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother, which, in essence, is a kind of autobiography, knows that the popularized image of the artist as an uncouth, irrational, semi-literate wild man, stabbing at the canvas in frantic desperation like a crazed orangutan, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Though certainly emotionally troubled, Van Gogh was a thoughtful, well read and articulate individual, whose insights, observations and accounts of his personal journey as an artist are illuminating on many levels.

Van Gogh wrote hundreds of letters, a number of which contain sketches, or even well developed drawings, that frequently presage his paintings or refer to the circumstances under which they were painted. Together, they form an account of the artist’s life and work that is unlike anything we have from other major artists.

There are several other collections of Van Gogh’s letters, from those specific to a particular time in the artist’s life, like Vincent Van Gogh – Letters from Provence (The illustrated letters), to more comprehensive collections like Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Touchstone), The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Penguin Classics) and Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh (Bulfinch).

The latest and most deluxe collection, which should soon be available, is Vincent van Gogh — The Letters (Thames & Hudson) (details here), a multi volume set collecting all of his letters with new transcriptions and translations, reproductions of the illustrated letters and reproductions of all of the works that are referred to in the letters. It promises to be a unique study of the artist and his work, told from the artist’s point of view; but at a list price of $600 U.S. ($480 on Amazon), it’s not exactly a mass market collection.

The book set accompanies a new exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (choose a language at the upper left), called Van Gogh’s letters: the artist speaks, that showcases many of his letters from the museum’s collection and displays them with related paintings and drawings, forming an exhibition in which the artist, in effect, provides the commentary on his own work.

The exhibition runs until the 3rd of January, 2010, but it is part of a larger project, in which the letters were reexamined and photographed in preparation for both the exhibit and the book; and the museum has mounted excellent web resources that will continue after the exhibition has closed.

There is a web site devoted to the project at www.vangoghletters.org that is essentially a comprehensive, online, databased version of the book project. It can be searched by period, correspondent or place; or filtered for letters with sketches. There are also advanced search capabilities and background features on the artist, his time, the people with whom he was corresponding and more.

The letters are displayed as original text, translated, with notes and facsimile reproductions of the letters themselves, as well as reproductions of artwork (by Van Gogh and other artists) referred to in the letters.

It’s easy to miss the small links at top of the columns to the facsimile versions and artworks, and it’s worth looking through the Quick Guide they have offered to getting the most out of the resource (it pops up by default the first time you access the letters).

As if this wasn’t enough to delight lovers of Van Gogh’s work, the museum is also maintaining a wonderful Van Gogh Blog, in which letters form the artist are posted daily, giving the effect of the artist writing a daily blog post, or corresponding with you personally on a daily basis (whichever appeals to your disposition). The posts are accompanied with drawings and sketches.

The blog just started in the beginning of October, so you can catch up and then read a daily post from Van Gogh to start your day. Wonderful.

Addendum: Peacay has posted a very nice article with images and quotes from the letters on Bibliodyssey.

One of the best things about the internet is its exponential rate of growth. If there’s something you can’t find today, wait a few years (or months, or days) and it just may pop up. “All things”, to paraphrase the zen-like passage from the Bible, “come to he who waits.”

When I started writing Lines and Colors back in 2005, my very first post was about the Art Renewal Center, a sprawling art image resource dedicated to representational art. Since then I’ve discovered many other art image portals, like terrific Web Gallery of Art (see my post here), and The Athenaeum, which has recently been one of my favorites; as well as several others that I frequently link to in my posts about well represented artists from the past.

Sites like ARC, the WGA and the Athenaeum are constantly adding to and improving their image catalogs, but occasionally I’ll be surprised to find a new (at least to me) major trove of online art.

A case in point is the Allpaintings Art Portal, which I wasn’t aware of until a few months ago (at allpaintings.org, allpaintings.com is just a squatted domain). Im not certain how long the site has been established, but it boasts over 33,000 images (though some of them contemporary, in a “Users Gallery”), as well as a blog and Art News listing.

The works are arranged in general stylistic categories with oddly varying degrees of specificity, like Baroque, Impressionism, Hudson River School, Barbizon School, Symbolism and Realism, with subsections for individual artists.

The image “thumbnails”, actually quite large, are presented as square crops and alphabetically arranged, oddly enough, by the artists’ given names rather than by surname.

While not “complete” in any sense of the word, or even “as complete” as some of the art image sites that have been established for many years, the site nonetheless contains an impressive number of images, carefully selected and nicely presented; with well balanced color and good quality of reproduction.

The best thing about the Allpaintings Art Portal, though, is the size of the images. While many of the other art portals have very large images for some works, the Allpaintings site seems to be taking pains to post large images whenever possible, some of them are among the highest resolution images of paintings you’ll find in art portal sites.

Once you’ve drilled down through an artist to an individual painting. look for the link above it to “View larger Image” (the image itself at that point is often linked to a detail crop, or a series of them, click on the text link for the full large image).

The selection of images is impressive as well. Though fewer artists may be represented than other portal sites, the selection of images for an individual artist may include images not found in the others, such as one of the best resources for the pre-tonalist work of George Inness (my post here), good selections of American Impressionist Theodore Robinson and undersung French Impressionist Gustav Caillebotte (my post here), a section dedicated the Pre-Raphaelites (my post here) and related painters, including John William Waterhouse (my post here), a wonderful selection of very high resolution detail crops from Caravaggio’s paintings, and probably the best resource anywhere for one of my (undeservedly obscure) favorites, Frits Thaulow (Hooray! — my post here); just to name a few.

(Image above: Caravaggio, Frits Thaulow, Theodore Robinson, George Inness, Gustav Caillebotte, John William Waterhouse)

As usual in this kind of situation, I’ll issue my Major Time Sink Warning. There are enough beautiful images here to keep you avoiding work for weeks on end.

Enjoy.

Occasionally artists will become particularly fascinated with the work of one of their predecessors, and study the work of that artist in depth. Such is the case with Jonathan Janson, and artist originally from (if I’m not mistaken) Seattle, now living and working in Rome.

Janson has a deep and abiding interest in the work of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in the history of art. The result of that fascination is twofold.

One happy result is that Janson has gifted us with Essential Vermeer, an astonishingly extensive and beautifully crafted web resource on Vermeer and his work, that is the high mark for any web resource devoted to a single artist (see my previous post on Essential Vermeer). The only close second, in fact, is Janson’s other, somewhat similar, site: Rembrant van Rijn: Life and Work (see my previous post about the site under its old title, Rembrandt: life paintings etchings drawings and self portraits).

In addition, Janson has created an extensive sub-site devoted specifically to the study of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and has recently started a blog called Flying Fox, focused on Vermeer, exhibitions and loans of his works as well as other related topics. (The name Flying Fox is from an inn in Delft that was likely central to Vermeer’s world.)

I liken Janson’s Vermeer and Rembrandt sites to the 21st Century equivalent of artist monographs, but bringing to bear the advantages of web technology to extend the lines of information deep into the resources of the web.

Another difference between these sites and traditional monographs is that monographs on artists are usually written by art historians, who study art from a certain perspective, but rarely the perspective of a working artist. The advantages of the latter viewpoint are particularly evident in Janson’s study of Vermeer’s Painting Techinque.

Janson not only brings the perspective of a painter to his writing and research on Vermeer, but moves the knowledge in the other direction, to the second result of his fascination with that artist, in the way it has transformed and informed his own painting.

Many of Janson’s recent works are in-depth and in-practice explorations of Vermeer’s techniques, some of which he has codified in a book, How to Paint Your Own Vermeer: Recapturing materials and Methods of a Seventeenth-Century Master.

Janson’s own explorations of Vermeer’s approach even extend to humorous recasting of some of Vermeer’s famous compositions into his own modern counterparts, a practice that can be simultaneously hilarious and poetic, as in his Girl Playing a Guitar, in which a purple Stratocaster takes the place of Vermeer’s more demure instruments in Woman with a Lute and The Guitar Player.

You can see the same humorous but beautifully painted approach in Janson’s adaptation of Vermeer’s composition from A Lady Writing (see my post on A Vermeer Comes to California), as Young Girl Writing an Email (image above, larger version here), in which Vermeer’s elegant box (perhaps a music box?) has been replaced with a boom box and his quill and inkwell with a laptop. Janson has retained the pearls on the table, and, of course, that wonderful earring.

Vermeer can be surprisingly painterly at times, belying the apparent “realism” of his paintings, and can also be remarkably “soft”, despite the perception he gives of intricate sharp detail. Also, perhaps because of his use of a camera obscura, Vermeer seems in general preoccupied with matters of focus, both in terms of degrees of visual sharpness and compositionally. Janson explores both of these aspects of Vermeer’s work in his own compositions, the soft edges and painterly touches being particularly evident in Girl Writing an Email (details above).

On Janson’s site you can see other examples of his Vermeer inspired interiors as well as his contemplative Seattle landscapes and watercolors.

There is currently a show of Janson’s work at Galleria dell’Incisione in Brescia, Italy until January 30, 2009.

Janson’s fascination with Vermeer has put him on a path of exploration that reaches into the past and future at the same time, in the process throwing a contemporary light on the master’s approach, and giving us a unique perspective from an artist who has done his best to look at a great painter from the “inside”, while revealing his own sensibilities and unique artistic vision.

I’ll start out by giving the Major Time Sink Warning.

The Museum of Online Museums is site maintained by Coudal Partners, a design firm based in Chicago.

Basically it’s a list of links to an eclectic collection of online sites, either virtual museums, or online extensions of brick and mortar museums.

It ranges from the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History, to obscure and wonderfully bizarre collections like The Galleries of Thrift Store Art and the Museum of Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers.

Though there are plenty of art related links, the MoOM is not entirely art oriented, and you’ll find such gems as Very Small Objects, The Museum of Useful Things, The Virtual Typewriter Museum and the Squished Penny Museum.

The majority of the selections are art or design oriented, however; bearing in mind that’s a broad definition that includes things like The Museum of Bad Album Covers, The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, The Magazine Cover Archive, A Few Thousand Science Fiction Magazines, The Comic Book Cover Browser (which I’ve mentioned before), and the Museum of Imagined Contemporary Art.

There are also big items like the National Portrait Gallery (my post here), the Rijkemuseum, The Van Gogh Gallery, Art Treasures from Kyoto and the Russian Museums List.

There is a small, blog-like column on the left called “Now Showing”, in which half a dozen items are featured and described in more detail.

The MoOM is updated quarterly and you can sign up for a mailing list notification.

Remember, I did give you the Major Time Sink Warning.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where I had the privilege of studying as a painting major, is the oldest art school in the United States. Modeled after the academic schools of Europe, it has a long tradition of training American artists and a correspondingly long history of collecting American art for its associated museum.

The school and museum share a web site, which has just been completely redesigned and rearranged, and it is now much easier to browse the museum’s extraordinary collection. The collection is particularly rich in beautiful 19th Century paintings.

You can search for individual artists, view their paintings, sculpture or works on paper separately, or view all works together. You can also simply browse the collection as a whole by the same criteria, a delightful exercise that will lead you to unexpected treasures. In addition you can browse by artist, medium or period.

My one complaint (as usual) is the size of the images. There are larger versions associated with most of the works, and though adequate for getting a feeling for the work, still much smaller than they need to be for real appreciation. Hopefully that will be supplemented with additional images or some kind of image zooming feature in the future.

In the meanwhile, once you find a piece you like, you can search the web for additional images or information on that artist (here’s a great new visual search engine, SearchMe, that has an interface like the Mac “Cover Flow” system used on their new OS and on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and makes visual browsing more efficient).

Even better, of course, if you have the option, is to visit the Academy here in Philadelphia, where they always have a superb selection form the permanent collection on display in the beautiful Furness building.

(Images above: Cecilia Beaux, George Inness, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, John White Alexander, Charles Courtney Curran, John Sloan. Links are to my previous posts on those artists.)

The Web Gallery of Art (WGA) is one of the best and most extensive of the “online museums” on the web.

The WGA is more specific than some, with a focus on European Art from the Gothic to the Romantic periods (1100 to 1850). The gallery has a search function, as you would expect, as well as an alphabetical Artist Index (at the bottom of every page).

Clicking on an artist’s name in the index brings up either a page of thumbnails, or, if the artist’s listing is extensive enough, text links to two or more sections, each of which has a page or more of thumbnails.

Clicking on a thumbnail opens a pop-up with a large version of the image. (I’ve experienced some problems with this when using Safari for Mac, try refreshing the window if it’s blank. The popup feature works more reliably in IE and Firefox). The popup has a choice of images sizes, though 100% seems optimal for quality.

There is also a column in the thumbnails pages with an “I”; clicking on this gives you a page with a medium size image and text details about the image (date, size, medium and description or background information). The artist thumbnail pages and image detail pages also have a link at page top to the artist’s biography.

An interesting feature of the WGA is the “Dual Mode” (a link at page top), which makes use of frames (a browser feature that allows for the display of more than one web page in the same window) to allow you to either search a list in one frame and have the results display in the other (the default), or, if you deselect that choice at the bottom of the frame, you can search two lists independently, bringing up two different selections side by side for comparison. (In the image above I’ve chosen to compare Titian’s Man With the Blue Sleeve to one of Rembrandt’s self portraits.)

As usual with frames, it’s often possible to find yourself a bit confused and you may need to back out to the front page and start over, but it’s a nice feature if you get used to it.

The Web Gallery of Art has an extensive database of over 20,000 images, lots of information about the artists and the individual works, and nicely includes many drawings and graphics as well as paintings. This can be a terrific resource, and/or a major time-sink.

Enjoy.

Wow, that guy could paint!

This was essentially my response when I first encountered the work of John Singer Sargent back in my art school days.

I was disappointed, though, to find that the art history books treated him with less regard than I expected. “Facile”, “highly skilled” and “renowned portrait painter”, seemed to be the best they could say of him. I would read the discussions of the great painters and constantly be frustrated to find him not on the list. “Oh yeah”, seemed to be the consensus, “one of those late 19th Century painters who was all technique and no substance — not important in the grand scheme of things”.

I eventually figured out that the late 20th Century art establishment had a bug up its collective ass about 19th Century Academic art in particular, and that in a world where “flatness” was a pinnacle of achievement, and white on white conceptual abstracts painted on 12 foot canvasses with paint rollers were trading for millions of dollars, “facile” was a bad word; and that “substance” and “important in the grand scheme of things” meant “leading up to modernism”.

As I gained the knowledge and confidence to form my own opinions, and understand that the “experts” were often idiots, I realized that my initial impression of Sargent was a true one.

Of all of the great painters I have come to admire over the years, two are at the top of my list of personal favorites, Vermeer and Sargent.

The more I learn about painting itself, the higher my regard for Sargent becomes, and I consider him one of greatest painters in the history of Western art.

The art snob intellectuals will still turn up their nose at this, of course, but as the froth of modernism has receded in recent years, and some semblance of balance has returned to the art establishment, Sargent’s star has risen again.

He also gets knocked because he was a society portrait painter, which of course is a crime similar to engaging in “commercial art” or (horrors!), illustration. Sargent himself eventually got tired of his parade of rich sitters and the limitations of pleasing the upper class with pictures of themselves, but in the course of painting portraits, he was painting the visual world.

I have to admit that his paintings on the surface are not infused with great emotion or drama, he seems as unconnected to his sitters as those he painted in groups seem to each other. By accounts Sargent apparently did not have strong ties outside his family, but it is not in the emotional character of his faces and figures that I find the passion in Sargent’s work, it is in the painting itself.

If you approach Sargent’s portraits as “living still lifes” or “interior landscapes”, you may begin to see what I mean. Look at the folds in a dress, the way soft interior light bounces off valleys of satin, glowing with subtle but intense colors, like a misty Impressionist garden in the rain. Look at the textures of cloth, hair and skin; the rose colors where blood vessels are close to the surface in noses and cheeks; the sweep of light through dark interiors and the interplay of varied-colored brushstrokes, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of some distant symphony…

Here is Sargent’s passion, not found in his bored dilettante subjects, but in spite of them, in the act of painting itself. Yes, there is romance and drama in Sargent’s work, but it is less in his images than in his brushstrokes. If you go to look at Sargent’s oil paintings, get up close.

The painting above, Nonchaloir (”nonchalance”, sometimes titled as “Repose” – larger reproduction here), is a non-commissioined portrait of Sargent’s niece, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Even as family, her individuality is lost in his exploration of splashing light, rich, subtle color and the dance of his brush.

Sargent was considered an American painter, though he was born in Florence to American parents and spent most of his working life in Paris and London. He studied in the Paris atelier of the well known portrait painter Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, and took drawing classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. (If you haven’t seen any of Sargent’s charcoal drawings, look them up. There is a nice inexpensive book of them from Dover Books, Sargent Portrait Drawings.)

Sargent took inspiration from Valázquez, the painter’s painter, and some of the wonderfully facile Baroque portrait painters like Anthony van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough; looking back to the inspiration of the past when the art world was beginning it’s mad, blind dash for the future. Even critics of the time began dismissing him as irrelevant.

He became tremendously successful as a portrait painter, though he scandalized the conservative art establishment with his notorious portrait of “Madame X“, (Madame Gautreau), a famous painting that he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sargent, like many of the so-called “American Impressionists” whose work I particularly enjoy, took influence form the French Impressionists. Sargent visited Monet at Giverny and associatied with others in the circle; but like the other “American Impressionists”, didn’t share the need the rebellious French painters felt to reject the traditional underpinnings of academic drawing and representational solidity, resulting in a wonderfully free blend of draftsmanship, color, and loose, painterly brushwork.

Sargent eventually abandoned his society portraits and devoted his later career to traveling and painting, largely in watercolor, a medium in which he was as stunningly accomplished and “facile’ as in oil. (See my previous post on Sargent in Venice.)

Happily, Sargent is in vogue these days and there are lots of great resources, both online and in print.

One of the best online resources for Sargent is the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery. Though the organization is not as convenient as you might like, there is a great deal of information and lots of wonderful art to be found here.

Sargent’s resurgence of popularity has resulted in a number of fine books over the past several years. Here are some of the ones on my shelves:

John Singer Sargent by Kate F. Jennings is a good place to start, it’s absurdly inexpensive ($10) and this slim but oversize book is filled with large scale reproductions.

John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff is large and informative (you may be able to find it less expensively used), and has some nice details, though some of them are in black and white (which can be instructive in itself).

John Singer Sargent by Trevor Fairbrother has a nice cross section of oils, watercolors and drawings, and the text is a good overview of the painter and his work.

John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, also by Trevor Fairbrother, is one of my favorites, and speaks, I think, to some of what I see in his passion for the visual world.

The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent by Carl Little is beautiful. No painter of representational watercolors should be unaware of it.

The best resource, though, if possible, is to see if there are works by Sargent in a museum near you, and put your nose up to one.

Whatever else you may say about John Singer Sargent, one thing is undeniable:

Wow, that guy could paint!

Addendum: Katherine Tyrell has assembled an amazing Squidoo lens of John Singer Sargent Resources.

It’s brimming with links to articles, bios, online galleries, Flickr photo sets, YouTube videos, Amazon book listings and descriptions, art galleries and museums, exhibition listings, portrait resources, geographical places associated with the artist, drawings and sketches, Del.icio.us bookmarks, and blog posts; including several on her own excellent art blog, Making a Mark, on which she initiated a John Singer Sargent Project to call on her extensive circle of internet contacts to help assemble the material in the course of a month long study of the artist.

Along with the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery, the most comprehensive resource on Sargent I’ve seen.

It’s nice to start the new year by looking forward, but it can be just as instructive to look back; and there are some great resources that make looking back easier and more fruitful than ever.

Project Gutenberg is a great idea. Not just in the sense of “great” as “terrific”, but in the sense of “great” as “milestone” or “extraordinary”.

If you’re not familiar with it, Project Gutenberg is an attempt to digitize and archive as many public domain cultural works as possible (as opposed to archiving technical information). Started in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, and maintained and contributed to by thousands of volunteers, the archive already contains the full text of more then 20,000 books that are old enough to have moved into the public domain.

These are archived as free eBooks in several formats, Plucker a format that can be read on a Palm device or smartphone with the open source Plucker Viewer; HTML, which can be read online or downloaded as a Zip file; and plain text in ascii and utf-8 encodings. There are also audio books, sheet music and pictures.

Even though the length of time it takes for a book to become public domain was extended by the Copyright Term Extension Act, as the result of intensive lobbying by Disney and other corporate entertainment barons (hence its nickname as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the change happened as MM was about to slip into public domain), there are still a number of books in the archive printed after color printing became economical enough to include good reproductions of illustrations and other paintings, in addition to the older pen and ink illustrations.

Unfortunately, the weak link in the Project Gutenberg chain seems to be that the scanning and preparation of many illustrated books for the archive has apparently been done by individuals with no knowledge of graphic arts basics, and/or by brain damaged rhesus monkeys, resulting in the frustrating presence of a number archived illustrated books in which the illustrations are dark, blurry, over-compressed smears, or ratty, scratchy GIF files. (The latter is sadly the state of their archive of the wonderful John Tenniel illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For better resources, see my post on Sir John Tenniel).

Thankfully, this is not always the fate of illustrated books in the collection, possibly because some graphics knowledgeable people have volunteered to help. A case in point is Masters of Water-Colour Painting by H.N. Cundall (HTML version here), a book published in the 1920’s with color plates of great watercolors, like the plate above, “Palazzo Contarini Fasan on the Grand Canal, Venice” by Samuel Prout.

There are some other gems in the collection but you have to look for them, a process that’s not always as easy as is should be. The project has a decent search feature, if you know what you’re looking for, but is weak on browsing. Repeated searching can bare fruit, the terms “painting” and “painters” will return different results. Try the Advanced Search or Catalog Overview page, from which you can use the Anacleo, Yahoo and Google search features.

Also, once you find a title you like, look in the “Bibliographic Record” section toward the top of that entry’s main page for the “LoC Class” link, in the case of the above title, the class is “ND: Fine Arts; Painting“, and returns some good results.

Digging will be rewarded.

Obviously, a project like this depends on contributions of money and time (they are always asking for help in the form of distributed proofreaders); and, though I can’t speak for the program, it looks to me like it might benefit in particular from they help of individuals with some knowledge of digital media and graphic arts.

[Masters of Water-Colour Painting link via Acuarela]

MUVA (Museo Virtual de Artes – El Pais) is a virtual art museum for contemporary art from Uruguay. It’s been on the web for a number of years. I’m not sure exactly when it debuted, but it predates the virtual spaces in virtual worlds like Second Life by a good bit.

The museum is an online gallery, with rotating shows of various artists, that is arranged in a 3-D virtual space that you can “walk though” using links in the interface. Hovering your mouse over parts of the interface, or on control buttons, allows you to navigate through the gallery spaces in which previews of the works are arranged like paintings hanging on the virtual walls of the museum. Clicking directly on a work allows you to view a larger image of the work in much the same way you would in a standard online gallery. A small map in the interface shows you your position and orientation within the museum’s floors and galleries.

There is a relatively new Flash version now to compliment the original HTML version (shown here). Try a little of both to see which you prefer, depending on the speed of your connection. Both versions are offered in either Spanish or English. When in doubt, there is a help feature at the bottom of the interface and if you become impatient, use the Site Map.

This arrangement is obviously not as efficient as regular thumbnail-and-enlargement online galleries, but sometimes, particularly when viewing art, efficiency is not the point. The 3-D environment is convincing and consistent enough to give you a feeling of taking some time to wander through a real museum, with it’s attendant “Let’s see what’s in this gallery.” sense of exploration.

Overall the effect is clever and entertaining in it own right, leading you to perhaps spend some time with some artists that you might not be familiar with or seek out under other circumstances.

2006 marks the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, so you’re likely to hear a lot about him this year, from me and others. As part of Holland’s celebration of Rembrandt’s 400th, two of the major museums in Amsterdam, the Rijksmusem and the Van Gogh Museum are having a fascinating exhibit (at the latter space) celebrating and comparing the work of home-boy Rembrandt with bad-boy Caravaggio in what promises to the the chiaroscuro smack-down of the ages.

The Rembrandt – Caravaggio exhibit (which also has its own site here), will compare the work of the two great painters by hanging their paintings side by side, giving visitors the chance to compare their technique, subject matter and emotional impact.

Rembrandt and Caravaggio (actually Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio, Italy) were the two greatest masters of the Baroque period, and two of the greatest painters ever. Both were revolutionary in their way, both reached heights of success and depths of personal tragedy, both painted scenes of violence (usually biblical) as well as calmer subjects, and both developed their own powerful style and acquired painting skills in the rarified heights of supreme virtuosity.

Rembrandt was influenced by Caravaggio; he learned of the other master through Dutch artists like Honthorst and Van Baburen who traveled to Italy and carried the Italian master’s influence in their own work. It’s unlikely the influence traveled in the other direction.

Both painters were masters of chiaroscuro, the use of dramatic contrasts of light and shadow to describe form. (Chiaroscuro is Italian for “lightdark”.) You can see the technique, as well as some of the power, drama and superb skill of both painters in the images I’ve posted above: Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson and Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Since we can’t all go to Amasterdam for the exhibit (sigh), here are some links to resources and galleries for the two artists on the web so we can do our own smack-down. Unfortunately, there’s nothing for Caravaggio like Jonathan Janson’s amazing site devoted to Rembrandt: life , paintings, etchings, drawings and self protraits. (See my post about this site and Rembrandt’s drawings.) The other major web galleries are represented in my list for both artists:

Art Renewal Center: Rembrandt
Art Renewal Center: Caravaggio

Webmuseum: Rembrandt
Webmuseum: Caravaggio

Web Gallery of Art: Rembrandt
Web Gallery of Art: Caravaggio

Olga’s Gallery: Rembrandt (contains ads)
Olga’s Gallery: Caravaggio (contains ads)

Artchive: Caravaggio (contains ads)
Artchive: Rembrandt (contains ads)

On canvas, my money would be on Rembrandt, if only because I feel a more human connection to his work than to the turbulent emotions of Caravaggio. In the ring, however, smart money would be on Caravaggio, who had a history of violent conflicts, arrests and imprisonments for assaults, and killed a man in a dispute over a game of court tennis. (He spent a couple of years on the run, during which time he did some of his finest work, and was eventually pardoned by the Pope.)

In either case we come out the winners. It’s hard to overstate the importance and influence of these two heavyweights of painting virtuosity and artistic vision.