This magisterial new work is the first to focus on Rembrandt's portrayal of women. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, it examines the women in Rembrandt's life, as well as his unique approach to depicting the female form in paintings, drawings, and prints. The book features 140 superb works drawn from the finest collections in the world -- sketches of women employed in household chores, mothers with babies and toddlers, paintings of smiling servant girls and wizened old women, studies of the female nude, pictures of goddesses and historical heroines, and his little-known erotic prints. It traces how mother, wife, mistress, maid and models appear in compositions, and follows how, throughout his life, Rembrandt combined classical and northern traditions, the personal and universal, with an extraordinary breadth of vision in his depiction of womankind. The essays by major Rembrandt scholars discuss the painter's biography in relation to the portrayal of the women in his household; the social position of women in Rembrandt's time; the artistic context of Rembrandt's nudes; the identity of the women who modelled for artists in 17th-century Holland; the significance of costume and jewelry in Rembrandt's images; eroticism in Rembrandt's works; and responses to Rembrandt's portrayal of women of later artists through the 18th and 19th centuries up to Picasso.
