Volker Manuth

How many Rembrandt books does one need? Depends on what you want. "Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited - A Complete Survey A Reprint of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI" by the leading expert Ernst van de Wetering comes close to being the best monograph on Rembrandt's paintings, but it is rivaled by the large format "Rembrandt. The Complete Paintings" by Volker Manuth. The text isn't necessarily better than the van de Wetering book, but lots of the reproductions are - both in size as in quality. But, some paintings only get a small reproduction - strange editorial choice. So I think the books are complementary, also because the Van de Wetering book is very insightful on how the authorship of Rembrandt paintings is established.

That brings us to this book - an offshoot of the Complete Paintings and its companion "Rembrandt. Complete Drawings and Etchings" by Peter Schatborn - both Taschen projects published in 2019. What you get is a lush packaging, with a lenticular print cover, and gold pages throughout the book. Its text is minimal: 6 pages of introduction, and a few lines on some of the paintings - but not all, and no lines to any of the etchings & drawings. All of the lines are lifted from the much longer Complete edition entries.

So the focus on the book is obviously the art, and what we get each time is a reproduction of the print or painting on the left page, if possible in its original size, with some basic information, and a full blown, full page reproduction on the right page - often zooming in a bit, but always including the full face. This contrasting approach works really well, especially for the etchings, as seeing their original small format only makes them more mindblowing.

The quality of the reproductions is (....)

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