Skip to main content

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 709,000 Works of Art, Including Famous Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer

Art may seem inessential to those who make the big decisions in times of crisis. But it has never seemed more necessary to artists working in the time of COVID. So it was 360 years ago when Rembrandt painted a portrait of his son, Titus, in a monk’s robe in 1660. Eight years later, Titus was dead from plague, which had only a few years earlier had killed Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s former housekeeper and second wife, who had helped raise Titus, Rembrandt’s only child to survive into adulthood.

These unimaginable losses “contributed to the tragedy and anguish we see in Rembrandt’s late self-portraits,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. During the plague, Rembrandt used his work as critique.

His painting The Rat-Poison Peddler, shows “in a sense,” the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Tom Rassieur tells the Star Tribune, “the guy who purports to be helping–the exterminator–is probably doing as much to spread the disease as anyone else. That relates to [criticism] of our leadership today.” In his last years, Rembrandt painted self-portraits of his isolation and grief that still resonate with our isolation and grief today.

Elsewhere in the Netherlands, Rembrandt’s contemporary Jan Vermeer “was no stranger to the kind of socially isolated world we now find ourselves in,” Breeze Barrington writes at CNN. “His hometown of Delft was stricken with plague several times in the artist’s lifetime. In 1635 and 1636 over 2,000 people died, and in the mid-1650s and mid-1660s hundreds more.” The qualities we most associate with Vermeer’s work, the solitude and attentive presence, were developed during time spent in isolation. 

“In this time of forced isolation,” says Friso Lammertse, curator of 17th-century Dutch painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Vermeer’s work “can point us at the fact that extreme beauty can be found just in our room.” The Rijksmuseum hasn’t just recommended art in our current state of isolation, but the museum has also doubled its collection of free, high resolution works online, by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and a host of other artists who used art to cope with loss and isolation during the plagues of their times. The museum now offers 709,622 digitized images in total.

The museum has promised, “we bring the museum to you,” and they have delivered not only with their extensive digital collection, free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, but also with informative series on their website. Art is essential in the best and worst of times, and especially now, when it shows us how to look closely at ourselves and our surroundings, and treat our lives with care and attention. Enter the Rijksmuseum online collections here. 

Related Content: 

Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces by Rembrandt Included!

The Largest & Most Detailed Photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

See the Complete Works of Vermeer in Augmented Reality: Google Makes Them Available on Your Smartphone

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 709,000 Works of Art, Including Famous Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3ber8rt
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more