In this beautiful book, the author presents for the first time an assessment of Rembrandt's painted landscapes, explaining the unusual nature of the images, the artistic heritage from which they came, and the meaning expressed in them.

A supreme master of landscape drawings, Rembrandt's extraordinary draftsmanship possessed a vitality and power that few artists ever achieve. This excellent volume displays in sharp, quality reproductions 60 authentic landscapes chosen from the great facsimile editions. Publisher's Note. Captions. 60 black-and-white illustrations.

Concentrates on Rembrandt's development in the genre of landscapes.

Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, the geographer Abraham Ortelius and the seventeenth-century poet Constantijn Huygens. Probing their conception of nature as 'the first Book of God' and art as its representation, Bakker identifies a world view that has its roots in the traditional Christian perceptions of God and creation. Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt imposes a new layer of interpretation on the richly varied landscapes of the great masters. In so doing it adds a new dimension to the insights offered by modern art-historical research. Further, Bakker's explorations of early modern art and literature provide essential background for any student of European intellectual history.

Rembrandt was a refined draftsman and an etcher, who has produced numerous evocative landscape and city views. Recent painstaking research at the Amsterdam Municipal Archives reveals that most of these scenes can be localized in and around Amsterdam, the city where the artist has spent most of his life. In this book, we accompany Rembrandt as he walks with his friends and pupils around Amsterdam, or out along the medieval dyke roads to the nearby villages. Together with country footpaths, farmsteads and windmills, Rembrandt left drawings of Amsterdam itself - streets, canals, towers, along with the old Town Hall. "Landscapes of Rembrandt" is an indispensable references work for scholars and admirers of the artist as well as those fascinated by the historic details about the changing landscape of Amsterdam and its surroundings.