Exploring Rembrandt

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Derek Churchill

Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, circa 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Rembrandt, Raising of Lazarus, ca. 1630-1632, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Photograph provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org)

You may have heard that Artstor recently allied itself with ITHAKA, the parent company of JSTOR. (And in case you missed it, Artstor had a pretty funny April Fools’ Day story about it.) Now that two of the leading providers of visual and textual content have joined forces, we should expect to see further integration of their resources.

A new pilot project gives us a glimpse of where this partnership may be heading in the future. Exploring Rembrandt shows how images of the master’s work from Artstor can be linked to articles in JSTOR that discuss them. It is still a small prototype–addressing only five of Rembrandt’s paintings so far–but I think it is easy to imagine how useful this could be on a much larger scale.

2015 Artstor Summary

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Derek Churchill

Freake-Gibbs Painter, Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake) and Baby Mary (detail), ca. 1671, Worcester Art Museum

As we enter the new year, the Artstor Digital Library now has more than two million images. To see all the collections that were added or expanded in 2015, and for a preview of what’s coming up in 2016, check out Artstor’s year-end summary.

Two new collections of note were added over the holidays:

The Mauritshuis in The Hague, which houses the Dutch royal picture gallery, including many of the masterpieces of 17th-century Dutch painting (for example, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch)
The Worcester Art Museum, home to one of the best collections in New England

And just today, several more Artstor collections have been enlarged:

Andean ceramics in the Fowler Museum at UCLA
Photography from Panos Pictures
Mexican art photographed by Bob Schalkwijk

25th Anniversary of the Gardner Theft

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Derek Churchill

Johannes Vermeer, The Concert (detail), ca. 1665, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (stolen 1990)

Twenty-five years ago today, two thieves stole thirteen works of art–together valued at around half a billion dollars–from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was the largest property crime ever in this country, and one of the most famous art thefts of all time. The stolen items have never been returned. The Gardner is still offering a $5,000,000 reward for their recovery.

Among the works lost were five drawings by Degas, a painting by Manet, three Rembrandts, and one of only about three dozen Vermeers in existence.

The Gardner is commemorating this milestone with a slideshow on its website, where you can learn more about these works and the events of March 18, 1990.

Art Museums in the News

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Derek Churchill

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed, 1630, Morgan Library and Museum, New York

Here are a few recent stories of interest from the museum world:

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York has digitized its entire collection of Rembrandt etchings. A new online collection of about 500 images lets you explore nearly all of the prints made by Rembrandt during his lifetime. These are not Open Access images, so you cannot do whatever you want with them, but you are permitted to download them for personal, educational, or noncommercial use.
The late Richard Mellon Scaife, who died earlier this month, has left roughly half of his art collection to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The rest of his collection will go to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh). There are few details about the nature of the collection itself, but it is said to consist mainly of American works.

New Collections in ARTstor

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Derek Churchill

Peter Paul Rubens, Angel, 1610-1611, Flint Institute of Arts

ARTstor has released over 50,000 new images during the month of May, including:

Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, home to the world’s premier collection of 17th-century Dutch art
Images from Lukas — Art in Flanders, featuring works in the museums and churches of Belgium
Works on paper in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Works in the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan

New Image Sources: Rijksmuseum, Statens Museum for Kunst

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Derek Churchill

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just released Rijksstudio, its new online collection of 125,000 images. You have to register (for free) in order to do much with the site, but it does then allow you to download excellent images of works from the Rijksmuseum’s peerless collection of Dutch art. The site’s Terms and Conditions do permit personal use of its images (e.g., in a Powerpoint presentation) without requiring a fee or special permission, but for commercial or professional use (including publications), you still have to apply to the Rijksmuseum by filling out an online form.

Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near Sortedam Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro (detail), 1838, Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark, www.smk.dk

Not quite so new, but more generous in their terms of use, are the 158 collection highlights released earlier this year as part of a pilot project by the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen. These images are made available for download and unrestricted use under a Creative Commons license. That means all you have to do is credit the Museum and its website as your image source, and you are free to use these images for any purpose, commercial or not.

You can read more about Rijksstudio here and about the Statens Museum for Kunst’s pilot project here.

The Rembrandt Database

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Derek Churchill

Rembrandt, “Tronie” of a Man with a Feathered Beret, mid- to late 1630s, Mauritshuis, The Hague (http://www.rembrandtdatabase.org)

A new website on Rembrandt has just been released by the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) in The Hague. Although this beta version includes only a few of his paintings so far, it looks like it will become an important online resource for scholars and students of the Dutch master.

Here’s the announcement:

As of today, The Rembrandt Database is online at www.rembrandtdatabase.org.

The Rembrandt Database is a freely accessible English-language website containing research material – texts, images and other research data – on paintings by Rembrandt or attributed to him, either now or in the past, from multiple institutions The Rembrandt Database aims to become the first port of call for those researching Rembrandt’s paintings. The Rembrandt Database focuses in particular on making available the body of visual and textual material that has arisen from the technical analysis and treatment of the paintings.

After a long period of behind-the-scenes work on cataloguing, digitizing and describing documentation, entering art-historical data and developing the database and the user interface, the website can now be seen by everyone for the first time. It is still in the beta stage, but will continue to be developed and will be expanded to include new functions. Much more content is already in preparation!

We want to thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its generous support, all of our partners for their collaboration and all participants in the user tests for their feedback! We look forward to continuing our collaboration with (more) partners and to improve and expand this website in the next months and years.

We hope that this will be a useful tool for research on Rembrandt and that you will enjoy working with it. We appreciate your feedback.

VRC@UD

The news blog of the Visual Resources Center at the University of Delaware

Tag Archives: Dutch art