The Eye of the Connoisseur: Authenticating Paintings by Rembrandt and His Contemporaries

About this book

Attributing old master paintings is one of the most difficult tasks of the art historian. While authorship has important implications for the field of art history and for valuation little has been written on the theory and techniques of the connoisseurs work. This volume analyzes the role of the experts intuition along with efforts to develop scientific techniques. The author focuses on the challenges of attributing seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art then turns to investigating connoisseurship arguing that to evaluate authenticity it is necessary to understand what it meant when the paintings were created. Further discussions probe the understanding of an original versus a copy at a time when painters routinely produced multiple versions of a work; the meaning of by the masters hand when paintings were often produced with the help of assistants; and the significance of style when artists intentionally varied theirs depending on the subject matter or the audience.