Rembrandt in America

For those of you who'll be in the triangle between now and mid January, I recommend the North Carolina Museum of Art's exhibit, "Rembrandt in America."  The exhibit focuses on Rembrandts collected in the United States and the theme that runs through this is what should be considered a Rembrandt?  It builds around the attributions made by the NC Museum of Art's first director, who was (it seems) extremely generous in attributions of paintings to Rembrandt.  And at several points they invite viewers to make their own judgments about attribution.  It's a very accessible exhibit and well worth the $18 admission -- or you might just want to go ahead and purchase a membership for $40, which gets you one admission ticket.

I'd hoped that they might have The Mill there, but perhaps National Gallery wouldn't loan it -- though there are several portraits from the National Gallery, as well as museums in Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis and some from private collections.  Among my favorites were two portraits of people with books -- Old Woman with a Book and Portrait of a Man Reading, from the Clark Institute -- and A Scholar by Candlelight, from a private collection in Milwaukee.  The historian of the book part of my personality causes me to take issue with the gallery's discussion of "Portrait of a Man Reading."  It says something along the lines of this shows the contemplative life. While books are, obviously, often associated with contemplation, they're also quite often -- especially law books -- also associated with activity.  As legal historians increasingly talk of law as a form of technology (Chris Tomlins, for instance, refers to law as one of the tools of colonization in Bound for Freedom -- and to go down a number of steps in sophistication, Stephen Davis and I talk of trusts as a form of technology in antebellum Alabama), we may also think of books as part of that technolgy.  It is quite possible that the Portrait of a Man Reading depicts a man using a book to plan some activity.  (I have that sense particularly because he has a finger holding a page in another part of the book; it seems very much that this reader is active.)

For those of you who won't have the chance to see the exhibit, here's a link to a very nice half hour program on the exhibit that was produced by UNC-TV.  The gallery guide is here.

Comments

[Michael Hoeflich]

Books are the products of technology, they contribute to the development of technology, and they are technology. If one looks at the types of books lawyers used in antebellum America different books represent various technologies. Printed reports represent a technological advance, arguably, on manuscript reports and significantly increase the distribution of knowledge of decisions thereby strengthening the rise of precedential thinking. Treatises are clearly an educational technology--as well as a means of propagandizing particular jurisprudential and political ideas. Common lace books are also an educational technology, but, also, are office technology and are a step on the long road to what today we refer to as information technology and retrieval. I could go on...and let's not forget the increasing use of preprinted legal forms. I have just been reading John Moretta's life of William Pitt Ballinger, a Galveston lawyer, and Moretta mentions that Ballinger charged more for documents he prepared and copied in his office than for documents using preprinted forms, a perfact example of hos technology lowered the cost of legal services.

[Eric Muller]

Leslie and I loved this exhibit, Al. I found the concept rather clever: the museum has a bunch of paintings it once thought were Rembrandts. turns out they're not... so they do an exhibit on true and false Rembrandt attribitions in North America. Brilliant!