Oh connoisseurship, what hath thou wrought?
By Gary Schwartz
Until June 27, a small exhibition of irresistible charm and interest is being held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after a run at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp: Willem van Haecht: room for art in 17th-century Antwerp. Van Haecht was one of the great masters of a kind [...]

By Gary Schwartz
On February 21, 2007, I had the honor of delivering the Third Annual Lecture of the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute. My subject was “Rembrandt’s paper trail,” but that is not the subject of this column. What keeps coming to mind is an exchange that [...]

The issues might seem highly technical and of interest only to specialists, but I think they do matter. In the first place they matter as a corrective to our understanding of Rembrandt, but they also matter for the critical insights they offer into the techniques and practices of scholarship.
By Gary Schwartz
Earlier columns were written in [...]

I envision Rembrandt with chalk or pen always at hand, sketching from life and imagination constantly. This is also how he taught his pupils, who like him also produced numerous drawings related and unrelated to paintings or prints. Why do so many experts disagree?

By Gary Schwartz

In an earlier column I illustrated a large number of [...]

How many drawings by Rembrandt are around? More than many experts admit. The issue is not just a quibble over numbers. It has far-reaching consequences for our reconstruction of Rembrandt’s working method and our understanding of his art. The showdown is coming at a conference on the artist at the J. Paul Getty Museum in [...]

By Gary Schwartz
To the memory of Dan Tsalka.

Among the acts of art vandalism blamed on the nineteenth century, one of the minor ones was actually undone fifteen years ago. It had to do with the dismemberment of a painting by Jan Steen of the wedding night of Sarah and Tobias, a story from the apocryphal [...]

It cannot be said that the average Omani was waiting for an exhibition of Rembrandt etchings.
By Gary Schwartz
“Frankincense from Oman and paintings by Rembrandt were both part of the good life in the 17th century.” That unlikely quotation is from the script of a film that I wrote and presented this summer to accompany an [...]

By Gary Schwartz

Once every three years since 1992, the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation, originally launched under another name in 1940 to aid the war effort, has awarded a prize to a person or institution in the humanities. It is a generous prize of 50,000 euros, of which two-thirds is to be spent on projects [...]

Is it more harmful for a museum item to be crated and shipped off to a loan exhibition or left hanging in its own gallery or storage facility? Do we see the scars of damage once they have been repaired?

Ronni Baer in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, December 2007
By Gary Schwartz
“I’m afraid that my [...]

By Gary Schwartz

Director Paul Thomas Anderson is no Upton Sinclair.
Half an hour into Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will be Blood, shown on Dutch television the other night, I told Loekie how intensely happy I was that the film existed. A few months ago I read the book on which the film is partly based, [...]