The Light Circus: Art of Nevada Neon Signs Tour Blueprint

The Light Circus: Art of Nevada Neon Signs Tour Blueprint 
October 13, 2012 – February 10, 2013

Introduction 
Since 1996 Reno native Will Durham has saved, collected and restored many of the neon signs he grew up admiring that might have otherwise been destroyed. In the process, he helped save the iconic Reno history that is connected to them. With many significant pieces of his collection included in the exhibition, a collaboration of preservation and passion will certainly highlight nostalgic and optimistic memories for Reno visitors and residents alike.

Main Text Panel
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages—the Light Circus is about to begin! From flashing incandescent bulbs to candy-colored neon tubes, brilliant light takes center stage in The Light Circus: Art of Nevada Neon Signs. This exhibition of vintage neon signs celebrates a bygone era when flickering neon and chaser lights graced many of Nevada’s most iconic restaurants, casinos, hotels, and business establishments. Many of the signs included in this rare collection have not been seen publicly since they illuminated street-side locales decades ago. For well over a decade, Reno collector Will Durham has worked to build this stunning collection of vintage neon signs. For the past year, Durham and the Nevada Museum of Art spent countless hours restoring the light fixtures, controls, and electrical wiring of these signs, along with their painted and porcelain surfaces. For Durham, who acquired his first sign in 1996, collecting them has been a labor of love. In many cases, he has gone to great lengths to save signs that would have otherwise been discarded. Salvaging this collection took years of persistence, but Durham recognized that saving the work was crucial to preserving Nevada’s history—and that sharing them with the public was even more important. The Museum is proud to be a part of this important historic preservation project and pleased to present them to you.

Lead sponsorship provided by The Bretzlaff Foundation Major sponsorship provided by Earl and Wanda Casazza, IGT, E. L. Cord Foundation and George and Irene Drews Supporting sponsorship provided by E. L. Wiegand Foundation Additional support provided by City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, Charlotte and Dick McConnell and the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

Wall Labels 

Mapes Hotel
Reno, Nevada
No other Reno hotel casino has enjoyed such a storied past as the Mapes. When its Art Deco-styled façade was completed in 1947, it was the tallest building in Nevada. With twelve stories, three hundred rooms, forty suites, seven retail shops, a casino, and an elegant penthouse nightclub known as the Sky Room, it embodied the best of sophisticated entertainment and architectural grace. The Mapes Family spared no expense in its construction, and at the time it was compared to the luxurious Plaza Hotel in New York and the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Headliners at the Sky Room included Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Liberace, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Mickey Rooney. For several months in 1960 the Mapes hosted the cast and crew of the popular film The Misfits, including Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift. An economic downturn and increased competition from other hotels and casinos eventually led to the closure of the Mapes on December 17, 1982. The property passed through many owners, until the City of Reno proposed the building for commercial and residential use. No plans were implemented, and despite community protests and lawsuits, the Reno City Council voted in 1999 to demolish the building. On January 30, 2000 the iconic building was imploded. The National Trust for Historic Preservation had placed the building on their list of Most Endangered Sites—and it was the first building on that list to ever be destroyed.

The Nevada Club
Reno, Nevada
These letters once graced the façade of the historic Nevada Club on Virginia Street. In 1946, Lincoln Fitzgerald and his associates, seeking refuge from legal prosecution in Detroit, moved to Reno and became partners with Harry and Ed Robbins in "Robbins Nevada Club,” which the brothers had opened in 1941. The men from Detroit had a notorious past—they had been associated with that city’s organized crime scene and operated the Chesterfield Club Gambling House until 1946, when the government began a crackdown on illegal gambling operations. The Nevada Club became a popular gambling operation in Reno, thanks in great part to the large number of slot machines and the longtime customer favorite: the “single-zero” Monte Carlo-style roulette wheel. In 1949, Fitzgerald was extradited to Michigan, where he was found guilty of illegal gambling practices and forced to pay heavy fines. In 1956, Fitzgerald purchased the Nevada Club outright and became the sole owner. The following year he was shot by an unknown assailant in his driveway at 123 Mark Twain Avenue in Reno. Although he never fully regained his health, he and his wife Meta moved from their home into an apartment with a bulletproof door on the Nevada Club property. From 1956 until 1983, the couple ran the daily operations of The Nevada Club and later the Nevada Lodge and Fitzgerald's Hotel and Casino. Fitzgerald died in 1981, and Meta sold the properties to Lincoln Management. The Nevada Club closed in 1997.

Van Ness Auto
Redwood City, California
One of the few signs in the exhibition that is not originally from Nevada, this jovial gentleman once welcomed customers to an auto parts store in Redwood City, California, just south of San Francisco. The establishment was most likely given its name to associate it with San Francisco’s famous Van Ness Auto Row. Will Durham likes to point out, “Like a lot of Nevadans, Van Ness was not born here. After years in the auto industry in Northern California, I encouraged him to move to Reno. For the last ten years he has served as the ringmaster of the Light Circus.”

Deux Gros Nez 
Reno, Nevada
One of Reno’s most legendary business establishments, Deux Gros Nez (which translates to “Two Big Noses”) is considered by many to be the first real coffee house in Reno. Founded by Tim Healion and John Jesse in 1985, it earned its reputation as a great meeting spot and the only place to find a frappe or latte for nearly twenty years. Although “the Deux” closed in 2007, its spirit lives on through the annual international bike race known as the Tour de Nez.

The Gambler, El Rancho Motel
Wells, Nevada
 Will Durham retrieved this sign from the El Rancho Hotel, located about an hour east of Elko, just off of Interstate 80. He explains, “In 2008, the building was damaged beyond repair in a serious earthquake. I was able to preserve this sign before the new owner did a major remodel on the façade. When I drove through Wells later, I saw a massive crack in the building where this sign once hung.”

The Swimmer, Zephyr Motel 
Reno, Nevada
The sign that started it all, this was the first acquisition Will Durham made for his collection in 1996. He now has more than 43 signs in his collection—only a portion is on view in this exhibition. “We backed a truck up and stood on the camper shell to take the sign down,” Durham explains. “The first thing I learned about neon signs is that they are framed in steel and are very heavy. We came close to breaking our backs and dropping the sign in the process of taking it down.”

Holiday Hotel-Casino
Reno, Nevada
The Holiday Hotel-Casino first opened in Reno at the corner of Mill and Lake Streets in December of 1956. Its eight-story tower overlooked the Truckee River and had fifty slot machines. In 1999, the Holiday property was sold at a public auction, re-built and re-opened as the Siena. This sign almost didn’t make it into Will Durham’s collection. He recalls, “I had arranged to preserve the Holiday signs in advance, but apparently the demolition crew didn’t get the word. I happened to drive by as all the signage was being ripped down by the claw of a backhoe. I was able to save this last remaining sign.”

Buffalo Bar
Sparks, Nevada
A popular watering hole in downtown Sparks for many years, the Buffalo Bar finally closed its doors on Victorian Avenue in 2001. After two years of discussion and negotiation with the owner of the bar, Will Durham finally received word of the date that the bar would close. “The manager informed me that he planned to blow up the sign as part of the grand opening for the new club,” Durham recalls. “Nothing says, we welcome your business like flying shrapnel and mercury! It’s a good thing that reason prevailed.” 


Stinker’s Truck Stop Bar
Los Angeles, California
Although based on a historical advertising character, this is the only contemporary sign in the exhibition. It was commissioned by Bobby Green, the owner of the short-lived Truck Stop Bar in Los Angeles as a tribute to the longtime gasoline and service stations known as Stinker Cut-Rate Gas Company. The company was based in Idaho and the skunk character was nicknamed Fearless Farris, after one of the original company owners Farris Lind. Stinker Stores continue to operate today under different ownership. This particular sign never hung alongside a highway. Rather, it was displayed over the Truck Stop Bar decorated with trucker kitsch and taxidermied skunks that occasionally released puffs of steam from beneath their tails.

Bucky, The Nevada Club 
Reno, Nevada
This sign, featuring Bucky, the Nevada Club cowboy, stands as a tribute to longtime commercial artist and illustrator Lew Hymers (1892-1953). For many years, Reno-born Hymers was known for his illustrated caricatures of the region’s movers and shakers, which appeared regularly in the “Seen About Town” column of the Nevada State Journal and later the Reno Gazette Journal. During his prolific career as a commercial artist, he produced logos, signs, advertisements, and cartoons for the Reno Rodeo, The Bank Club, Reno Brewing Company, and The Sportsman—just to name a few. His distinctive style was widely and easily recognized, and eventually became known nationally when he published a resource book for commercial artists, Stock Cuts: A Catalog from the Cartoon Shop of Lewis Hymers.

Parker’s Western Wear
Reno, Nevada
One of Reno’s legendary western clothing stores, Parker’s Western Wear, first opened in the early 1920s on Center Street. George Parker started the business and was later joined by his younger brother Harry Parker, after he completed his service in World War II. In 1971, the brothers moved the business to the Barengo Building on Sierra Street, where it remained until it closed in 1999. For decades, Parker’s catered to working cowboys, politicians, dude ranch visitors, Hollywood stars, and anyone else in need of a good Stetson hat, cowboy boots and a pair of Levi’s. Levi’s 501 jeans started at $3.00 a pair, or were discounted to $2.50 if you brought in that little red pocket tab! John Wayne shopped at Parker’s while he was filming The Shootist in the mid-1970s, as well as actors who were in Reno to film The Misfits in 1960. Locals will remember the creaking hardwood floors, the smell of leather and wool, and always a friendly greeting extended to anyone who walked through the door.

El Cholo Café 
Las Vegas, Nevada
 This sign for El Cholo Café, an early Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas in the 1950s, brings to light important issues related to Nevada’s cultural demographics and how perceptions and stereotypes of cultural communities can be shaped by commercial advertising. Historically, the word “cholo” was used in the United States along the Mexican-American border as a term referring to working class people of Mexican or Mexican-American descent. In this case, the term “el cholo,” coupled with the pejorative image of the “sleeping Mexican” makes the sign highly charged and potentially controversial. Despite its long history as a denigrating term, the word cholo was turned on its head and used as a symbol of pride in the context of cultural movements of the 1960s. An entire chain of restaurants in Southern California embraced the term as the name for their restaurants beginning in the 1920s.

Harolds Club
Reno, Nevada
Harold and Raymond Smith started Harolds Club in 1935 with a $500 loan from their father Harold “Pappy” Smith. The Smith family took great pride in their establishment and the club grew steadily over the years. By 1967, Harolds Club was the largest gambling business in Reno—and the first casino to advertise non-gaming attractions. Harolds Club displayed a huge collection of firearms and memorabilia related to the American West, and featured Western-themed rooms such as the Roaring Camp Room, the Covered Wagon Room, and the Silver Dollar Saloon. It was the first casino in Reno to hire women as dealers. These letters will be familiar to many locals as those that framed the bottom of the historic seventy-feet-long Harolds Club mural honoring the “Pioneers of the Old West.” For fifty years, the mural was one of the most prominent features on Virginia Street. Even after the Smiths sold the club in 1970, and up until Harolds Club closed in 1995, the mural remained in place. Four years later the mural was dismantled and eventually moved to the west side of the Reno Livestock Events Center, where it is still on view today.

Sahara Hotel and Casino 
Las Vegas, Nevada
 These letters from the exterior of the Sahara Hotel and Casino were icons on the old Las Vegas Strip for many years. The Moroccan-themed Sahara Hotel was a favorite of the Rat Pack—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop—who helped to put Las Vegas on the map as entertainment capital of the world in the 1960s. Headliners to perform in the Sahara’s splashy showrooms included Tina Turner, Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, and Louis Prima. Scenes for Viva Las Vegas (1964) featuring Elvis were filmed at the Sahara. The Sahara Hotel and Casino closed in 2011.

Las Quatro Reinas
Tijuana, Mexico
Will Durham would like to extend his thanks to the following people for their donations, assistance, and support in the preparation of this exhibition. The Cashell Family, Meg Glaser, Griff Durham, Kathleen Durham, Historic Reno Preservation Society, Tim Healion, SBE Entertainment, Pavich and Associates and Danielle Malley, and Shannon Giolito

Neon History

• Theory behind neon sign technology dates back to 1675 when French astronomer, Jean Picard, observed a faint glow in a mercury barometer tube that had been shaken. The barometric light occurred because of static electricity, which was not understood at the time. 
• In 1855 the geissler tube (named after Heinrick Geissler, a German physicist and glassblower) was invented. After electric generators were invented, inventors began conducting experiments with them, electrical power and various gases. When the geissler tube was placed under low pressure and electrical voltage was applied, the gas would glow. 
• Process of sending electrical charge into a sealed glass tube filled with inert gas to create illumination was developed by inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). It is said that he had a tube that went around his lab and used the glow for light instead of incandescent lights. 
• Basis system that is still in use today was developed and patented by George Claude in Paris in 1910. 
• Inspired by the bright neon lights of Paris while vacationing there in 1923, Earl C. Anthony of Los Angeles brought home a neon light for his showroom. 
• The first known neon sign to be hung in Nevada was in the window of the People’s Market in Elko. A picture of the market is dated 1928. A short time after this the first neon light lit-up Las Vegas. Tube Benders (term used by craftsmen) 
• The process, which appears to be simple, takes years to master. 
• Starts with a straight piece of glass tubing over a gas flame until the glass starts to “give” and is ready to form. 
• To shape the heated glass tube, a cork is put in one end and a rubber hose is attached to the other end. The glass blower then gently blows air periodically to keep the tube’s diameter a constant size, while bending the tube to the desired shape. 
• Using patterns that are drawn on paper to scale and in reverse, the letters and drawings are fabricated. 
• Each letter is formed individually and then welded together using a hand torch that fuses the molten glass to one another. 

Tour Framework, Feature Gallery South 

• Explain to visitors that neon was originally developed in Paris and was then introduced to the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century; ultimately becoming a part of both our historical fabric and mainstream identity today. 
• Ask what some of the contributing factors might be to neon’s popularity in the U.S. 
• Invite comments around specific uses of neon across the country throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. 
• Invite visitors to share memories they have of the businesses that the signs once adorned. 
• Explain the decline in neon’s popularity in the 1960s and 70s, leading to the disposal of many signs. 
• Ask guests to consider some of the social issues that were prominent of that era and if there is a possible connection. 
• Invite further exploration of the signs in the exhibition while considering what they represent and if there is valid rationale behind their reputation as signs of social demise. 
• Ask guests to consider the popularity and extensive use of neon signs in Nevada and what characteristics of both the state and neon make them a likely combination. 
• Explain that in 1675 Jean Picard observed a faint glow in a mercury barometer tube that had been shaken. The glow being the first known neon reaction observed and being similar to today’s neon technology. 
• Ask how it is possible this could have happened before the age of electricity. 
• Invite guests to share thoughts on what early observers of neon light must have thought, not knowing what was creating such a glow. 
• Explain to visitors that even though the signs are appealing artistically, their ultimate use was for advertising the business they adorned. 
• Ask what messages the signs are portraying and what prospective customer they may be attempting to appeal to. 
• Invite guests to consider how the creative advertising strategy of past eras differs from that of today. 
• Explain the extensive growth in advertising from the late 19th century and into the early 20th century from a “goods on hand” approach to a more persuasive advertising of branded goods. The shift fueled by increased consumer spending and credit availability for large purchases and leisure-time activities. 
• Ask if the popularity of neon signs could possibly be linked to this shift in advertising. 
• Invite comments on why neon was a popular candidate for signage and advertising.

Tour Framework: To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum Tour Framework

Sarcophagus Lids for Pa-di-Djehuti and Pa-di-Inpu, ca. 305-30 B.C.E.
These two large stone sarcophagus lids were made for a wealthy royal scribe and priest named Pa-di-Inpu and his son Pa-di-Djehuti. They are examples of the expensive tomb equipment we expect for all Egyptians. Yet only a limited group of people could afford burial in such elaborate stone coffins. Members of less-wealthy families made coffins from low-quality wood or even terracotta.

Pa-di-Djehuti: the Limestone sarcophagus lid of a man with wig and false beard has three vertical registers of hieroglyphs running down the front of the piece. The translation of these is as follows: “Royal scribe, accountant of all things, scribe of Anubis of Hiffonon. Thatpe-her (?) son of the royal scribe of the books of the temple of Hiffonon Pedi-Anubis, born of a priestess of Uazit of Hiffonon Set-ari-ban”.

Sarcophagus Lid for Pa-di-Inpu: a limestone sarcophagus lid of a man with a wig and beard. Three vertical registers of hieroglyphs run down the lower front. The translation is “Royal scribe, accountant of all things, priest of Hathor of Hebenis (the XVIth Nome of Upper Egypt), scribe of Anubis of Hiffonon (XVIIIth Nome of Upper Egypt), Pedi-Anubis, son of the Royal scribe, Pedi-Anubis born of a priestess of Uazit of Hiffonon Thet.”

Pyramidion of a Woman, ca. 1185-718 B.C.E.
Reliefs on four sides of this small pyramid from a woman’s tomb depict basic aspects of Egyptian belief. The deceased worships Osiris in the niche and Re on the back, the two major gods connected to the afterlife. On the right side, a human-headed bird representing the ba-soul, which travels outside the tomb, perches on a djed-pillar, a symbol of rebirth. The deceased is followed by two demigods. On the left side, the gods Horus and Thoth perform part of the funeral purification ritual on the deceased’s mummy.

Anthropoid Coffin of the Servant of the Great Place, Teti, ca. 1339-1307 B.C.E.
Egyptians after the New Kingdom desired coffins representing them as Osiris. This coffin was made for Teti, a “Servant of the Great Place.” This title was used by artisans who painted tombs in the Valley of the Kings and lived in Deir el-Medina. As a middle-class artisan, Teti paid nearly a year’s salary for a coffin of this quality. He was able to use five different paint colors to decorate his wooden coffin, including blue, yellow, red, black, and white. The yellow background paint with red streaks is used to imitate the gilded coffins of the wealthy.

Seated Statue of the Superintendent of the Granary Irukaptah, 2425-2350 B.C.E.
This statue functioned as a place for Irukaptah—also known as Kenu, a fifth dynasty dignitary—to receive offerings from this world to convey to the next world. The Egyptians believed that the ka-soul could inhabit a statue like this. Scenes of offering carved on the sides of this chair show men offering fowl, linen, and food in containers. On the back, two women offer objects in a chest and perhaps bread. These scenes substitute for or augment scenes of offerings that were carved on the walls of the tomb. Irukaptah was titled “Master Butcher of the Great House King’s Wab Priest.” His tomb near Saqqara is known widely as the “Butcher’s Tomb.”

Triad of Isis, the Child Horus, and Nepthys, 305-30 B.C.E.
After Osiris went to the afterlife, Isis raised her son Horus with the help of her sister Nephthys. Isis hid her son from his jealous uncle Seth, who had killed Osiris and taken the throne of Egypt from him. Amulets like this were placed on the lower torso of the mummy and protected the deceased as Isis and Nephthys protected Horus.

Statue of Horus as a Child, 664-332 B.C.E.
Horus grew up to challenge his uncle Seth, who had taken the throne from Osiris. A human child who wore this amulet received the protection that Isis had given to the child Horus. Such amulets continued to be worn after death.

Mummiform Figure of Osiris, 664-332 B.C.E.
The inscription identifies this figure as Osiris. He wears the crown of ostrich feathers, a sun-disk, and the ram’s horns that identify him as a king. Yet he is also in the form of a mummy with the curled beard worn by the dead. The figure stands on a hollow base in which a papyrus with a spell written on it was stored.

Relief with Netherworld Deities, ca. 1332 – 1250 B.C.E.
This relief carving is from the tomb of Yepu, an high official of ancient Egypt. The carving illustrates Spell 145 from The Book of the Dead when the deceased approaches the guardian deities of the fourth and sixth gates of the netherworld. The words inscribed on the carving were to be recited upon reaching the gates. A wealthy individual in ancient Egypt would have made sure to incorporate spells into many different forms so that he or she would remember all of them upon reaching the netherworld. In addition to this relief carving, which would have been affixed to his tomb’s wall, Yepu also likely had a papyrus version of The Book of the Dead.

Sheet from an Amduat: What is in the Netherworld, 945-712 B.C.E.
The Amduat—also known as The Book of the Dead—included spells that a deceased person would need to know and recite to speed his or her journey into the afterlife. This copy was made for a high-ranking priest of the god Amun. Most remaining examples of The Book of the Dead are only partially intact. This sheet contains Spell 15, which includes writing that gives the genealogy of the deceased and the name of the god Re-Har-akhty-Atum.

Gaming Board Inscribed for Amenhotep III, 1390-1353 B.C.E.
This board and gaming pieces were used to play a game the ancient Egyptians called senet—which loosely translates to “passing.” The game was played by two people, each of whom used seven game pieces to advance, jump over their opponent’s pieces, and eventually remove their pieces from the board. The first player to remove all of their game pieces won rebirth into the afterlife. Game boards such as this were used for over three thousand years in Egypt and were often included in tombs.

Block Statue of Padimahes
This statue of Padimahes would have been placed in a temple after his death. It is believed that his forward gaze was directed towards a temple procession. Padimahes’s ba-soul—the part of the human soul that remains with the body of the deceased after death, but which can travel in the mortal world and the afterlife—would have been able to share in the offerings made to the god in the temple, but would have then returned to the tomb.

Block Statue of Nesthoth, 305-30 B.C.E.
Nesthoth was named to honor the god Thoth. The baboon wearing the moon-disk, carved on his lower legs, is a symbol of Thoth.

Elaborately Painted Shroud of Neferhotep, Son of Herrotiou
This shroud for the mummy of Neferhotep was likely made during a time of Roman rule in Egypt, and thus it has Roman stylistic influences. The shroud bears a Roman-style portrait, similar to the panel portrait found on Demetrios’s mummy seen nearby in this gallery. Neferhotep’s mummy would have been less expensive, however, because the portrait was painted directly on the shroud instead of on a wooden panel, and because it was made with tempera paint instead of encaustic paints. When this shroud was excavated by French Egyptologist Bernard Bruyère in 1948, parts of it were missing. The darkened parts of the ultraviolet photograph reproduced here show areas of restoration undertaken around 1970.

Image of Ba-bird on a Footpiece from a Coffin, ca. 945-712 B.C.E.
The human-headed bird represents the ba-soul, part of the Egyptian soul that could leave the tomb and travel both in this world and in the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians recited spells to ensure that the ba returned to the mummy from its various journeys to maintain the proper burial.

Statuette of a Standing Hippopotamus, ca. 1938 -1539, B.C.E.
In ancient Egypt, Seth was disliked because he killed his brother, king Osiris, and then claimed the throne. Seth became known as the god of chaos and was often represented by the symbol of a hippopotamus. In an Egyptian tomb, negative forces were controlled by including a statue of a hippopotamus with broken legs. The lotus flowers on the sides of the hippopotamus signify how the animal might have appeared as if it were standing in the Nile River among natural vegetation.

Mummy of a Dog, Mummified Dog
Sometimes very wealthy ancient Egyptians chose to mummify their pets. Most often, however, such animal mummies were offerings to the gods. The animals mummified represented a god or goddess, such as the cat belonging to the goddess Bastet or the ibis belonging to the god Thoth. Some animal mummies contained a papyrus with a request to the god written on it.

The Mummy of Demtri[o]s, 95 – 100, C.E.
With Roman stylistic influences, this mummy of a wealthy Greek person known as Demetrios was likely made during a time when the Romans ruled Egypt. Made with expensive imported materials, it reveals the wealth of the deceased. A linen shroud is wrapped on top of this mummy’s bandages and painted with red pigment imported from Spain. The face of Demetrios is depicted in Roman-style on a wooden panel using pigments and encaustic. Artists also used gold leaf to incorporate divine Egyptian symbols, the name of the deceased, and his age (59 years) at the time of death. Researchers recently used a medical imaging method known as a CT scan to x-ray this mummy, revealing that Demetrios suffered from gallstones during his lifetime.

Headrest with Two Images of the God Bes
Headrests like this were used to support the heads of living persons while sleeping, but they are also found supporting heads of the deceased inside coffins. This headrest was likely made for a tomb because an offering prayer is inscribed on the supporting column. The prayer on the headrest also could have been added after the death of its owner.

Canopic Jars (Jackal, Hawk, Human, Baboon)
Canopic jars were used by ancient Egyptians to store mummified internal organs. Each organ was kept in a separate jar and preserved for the afterlife. Such jars first appeared in the royal tomb of Hetepheres, the mother of Khufu and builder of the Great Pyramid. The canopic jars seen here, however, were typical of those used by the middle-class. These more affordable jars were “dummies,” whose vessels were never hollowed out to actually hold organs, yet were sill included in the tomb of the deceased.

Panel from the Coffin of a Woman
This coffin is decorated with hieroglyphic texts invoking both national gods and the local gods of Asyut. A stand with five jars of oil, a bed with seven linen bags of materials for mummification, a mirror, and a pair ofsandals are all depicted on the coffin’s side, magically ensuring their presence in the tomb and with the deceased forever.

Standing Figure of Bes
Bes was the deity who protected women in childbirth and children during life and in the tomb. The god Bes had the face and tail of a lion, the legs of a dwarf, and a feathered headdress. Just as he protected the act of birth in the living world, he also aided rebirth into the next world. Bes amulets were made from many different materials, but the most prized were gold.

Statuette of Sennefer,ca. 1938-1837 B.C.E; Statuette of a Striding Man, ca. 2288-2170, B.C.E.
Carved from a softer, and therefore lower-grade limestone, these sculptures reveals less detail than some of those carved of harder limestone, diorite, or granite nearby. Though nearly all ancient Egyptian statues were painted, the paint on these statuettes hides the lower-grade stone used.

Coffin of the Lady of the House, Weretwahset, Reinscribed…
A typical coffin set would have included a coffin lid and a separate mummy board. In the original coffin set for Weretwahset the lid and board were combined. Generally, the lid would have been decorated to present the body of the deceased to the god Osiris, but in this example Weretwahse wears a dress that she would have worn in life. About two hundred years after Weretwahset died, this coffin was reused by someone named Bensuipet. Bensuipet added the mask and body cover, and erased Weretwahse’s name from the coffin in order to add her own.

Mummy Caronnage of a Woman, ca. 1st century C.E.
Head and Chest from a Sarcophagus, 4th century C.E.
These mummy covers convey the extremes between wealth and poverty in Roman Egypt. The professionally crafted, gilded, and inlaid mummy cartonnage was for a woman whose life and death were spent in luxury. In contrast, the hand-modeled and simply painted terracotta mask was probably fashioned by the woman it represented or a family member of the deceased. While both covers protected each mummy adequately, the different materials demonstrate how different social classes prepared the necessary objects for the next world.

Seated Statuette of Si-Hathor, ca. 1818-1630 B.C.E.
This statuette combines the seated image of the deceased with the base where the inscription would normally be carved (as in Seated Statuette of Sekhemka shown nearby). Here, the artist carved the offering prayer directly onto Si-Hathor’s garment, a solution that saved on the amount of stone to be purchased.

The Meaning of Amulets
Amulets were small objects worn by the living or attached to a mummy after death as a means of protection. Depending on what one could afford, amulets were made from either gold, precious stones, or simple ceramic faience.

The following kinds of amulets are in this exhibition:

Ba Amulets
These amulets were placed on the chest of the mummy. They ensured the return of the ba-soul, which could travel from the tomb to the world of the living and to the afterlife. Though the mummy was the ba’s home, The Book of the Dead suggests that Egyptians feared the ba might not always return. They believed that ba amulets could substitute for the true ba. These types of amulets were made from precious gemstones such as lapis lazuli, as well as less-expensive materials such as faience and glass.

Bes Amulets
These amulets were worn suspended from a chain around the neck. Bes was the deity who protected women in childbirth and children during life and in the tomb. The god Bes had the face and tail of a lion, the legs of a dwarf, and a feathered headdress. Just as he protected the act of birth in the living world, he also aided rebirth into the next world. Bes amulets were made from many different materials, but the most prized were gold.

Wadjet or Eye Amulets
Ancient Egyptians believed the moon to be the eye of the god Horus, represented symbolically by the wadjet-eye commonly depicted on amulets. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, the eye of Horus can be injured and healed. The wadjet-eye is probably the most common amulet, and was made from almost all materials.

Djed Amulets
The Book of the Dead refers to the djed as the backbone of the god Osiris, which allows him to rise up in the afterlife. The djed symbol may have originally come from the form of a tree trunk that was elevated during Osiris’s ceremony of resurrection. The hieroglyph on a djed translates to “enduring.”

Hollow Cylindrical Amulets
Amulets like this were suspended from a cord and worn around the neck. They contained a piece of papyrus with a written spell that offered protection to women and children. They are known only from the Middle and New Kingdoms and belonged to royalty and high-ranking members of society.

Heart Scarabs
Heart scarabs were placed over a mummy’s heart in the tomb. They were a specialized type of amulet shaped like a dung beetle. These beetles were known for pushing small pellets of dung, which reminded ancient Egyptians of how the sun god Re travelled across the sky. Heart scarabs were inscribed with a spell from The Book of the Dead imploring the heart not to testify against the deceased at the judgment of the dead.

Nefertum Amulets
Nefertum was the son of the great gods of Memphis, Ptah and Sekhmet. These three gods formed an alternative divine family parallel to Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Like the amulets of Horus, those of Nefertum were worn to protect young people in this life and the next.

Tyt Amulets
The Book of the Dead instructed ancient Egyptians to place a red jasper tyt amulet on the neck of the mummy. Shaped like the goddess Isis’ belt, the amulet guaranteed that she would protect the mummy.

Materials
Ancient Egyptians worked with gold and semiprecious stones mined in the deserts east of the Nile River in a place they called Nubia—present-day Sudan. Nub was the ancient Egyptian word for gold.
Ancient Egyptians made many objects using faience—a non-clay ceramic material made from crushed quartz and sand. Although many faience objects were reproduced in large quantities, sometimes extremely high quality pieces (such as this one) were made.

Figure of Pataikos, ca. 664-30 B.C.E.
In this amulet, the dwarf god Pataikos strangles snakes while standing on two crocodiles. A scarab rests on his head. Pataikos is flanked by Isis and Nephthys—the wife and sister of Osiris. This amulet would have been worn on a cord around the neck to protect the deceased from snakes and crocodiles in the afterlife. The name Pataikos refers to a protective god (or perhaps a whole group of related gods) in the form of a dwarf. Representations of Pataikos appear on amulets worn around the neck. The god is usually depicted with a bald head on which a scarab can be seen. Sometimes he has a falcon's head. He is often standing on crocodiles and holding other dangerous animals such as snakes in his hands. As far as attributes and function are concerned, he may be compared to the god Horus as depicted on magical stelae from the Late Period. Pataikos appears frequently from the New Kingdom on, but similar figures from the Old Kingdom may perhaps already be depictions of the god. The name Pataikos was introduced by the Greek writer Herodotus. He relates that in the temple of Memphis there was a statue of the god Ptah in the form of a dwarf, an image so remarkable that it provoked the mockery of the Persian king Cambyses. Herodotus compared the statue with a protective statuette in the shape of a dwarf that he knew from Phoenicia. He also records that Pataikos was regarded as the son of Ptah. We do indeed have representations of Pataikos from the Late Period whose texts identify him as Ptah or Ptah-Sokar. We also find Pataikos depicted together with Sakhmet or Nefertem, two gods who formed the triad of Memphis along with Ptah.

Shabties
Shabties were magical figures that people took with them in their tombs that would do work when they arrived in the next world. Shabties were made from stone, wood, faience, and (rarely) metal, depending on the tomb owner’s priorities. Amunemhet had a small number of very fine shabties, including the painted stone example shown here and a wooden example seen nearby.

Outer Sarcophagus of the Royal Prince, Count of Thebes, Pa-seba-khai-en-ipet, ca. 1075-945 B.C.E.
Ancient Egyptian elites eventually stopped building elaborate tombs and instead painted their coffins with scenes normally reserved for tomb walls. This outer coffin for the Royal Prince shows multiple scenes of the gods worshiped by the deceased. The coffin presents the deceased as Osiris and illustrates the many gods he will encounter in the afterlife. This coffin has been damaged but left unrepaired in order to show how it was made. Beneath the damaged paint, small pieces of wood were pinned together with wooden pegs. Artists then plastered and painted the surface to make it appear smooth.

Gee's Bend and Printmaking @ Paulson Bott Press

Click here for a short video about Gee's Bend at Paulson Bott Press

Click here for a short video about intaglio printmaking at Paulson Bott Press

Click here for a short demonstration of the intaglio printmaking process at Paulson Bott Press

Raphael: The Woman with the Veil Tour Blueprint

January 9 – March 21, 2010

Introduction

The exhibition of Raphael: The Woman with the Veil is presented by the E.L. Wiegand Foundation’s Arte Italia, organized by the Portland Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum and supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. This exhibition was made possible by the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture (FIAC).

FIAC

The Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, FIAC, is a non-profit organization established in New York City in 2003. FIAC's main purpose is to promote the knowledge and the appreciation of the Italian cultural and artistic traditions from the classical period to modern times in the United States, working closely with the Italian Ministry of Culture to accomplish this mission. In addition to sponsoring its own programs and exhibitions, FIAC acts as an intermediary between Italy and the United States to facilitate exchanges between American and Italian institutions.

Arte ITALIA

Founded in 2008, Arte ITALIA promotes the exploration and conservation of Italian culture, including innovative exhibitions of classic Italian art and culinary programs showcasing visiting regional Italian chefs. Arte ITALIA is located in the historic Joseph Giraud House at 442 Flint on the northeast corner of California Avenue. The historic house, built in 1914, was designed by Nevada’s premier architect Frederic De Longchamps and was recently remodeled to share Italy’s rich culture with visitors.

The presentation of Raphael: The Woman with the Veil represents Arte ITALIA’s first major collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art and serves as a model for the type of joint programming that will elevate the level of cultural life in northern Nevada. Given its historical and cultural significance, and the fact that the renowned painting has rarely left Italy, its exhibition in Reno presents a unique opportunity for the public to see, experience, and learn from a masterpiece that fully captures the ideals of Italy’s Renaissance.

Please visit Arte ITALIA to further explore the life and work of Raphael. Walking directions are available on the gallery brochure, and can also be obtained at the Main Admissions Desk. For more information about Arte ITALIA, please visit arteitaliausa.org.

Docents: Those of you leading public tours on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays: Please conclude your tour of The Woman with the Veil by offering to guide your tour goers to Arte Italia physically. If they wish not to go at the time you offer, please encourage visitors to make the short walk down California Avenue to the home of Arte Italia in the historic Giraud House at 442 Flint Street.

Text Panels

Who Was Raphael?

In his own time and afterward, Raphael was considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived, and the rival and equal of his contemporaries Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. He was born in 1483 in Urbino, a city famous for its rich artistic, intellectual, literary, and musical culture. Raphael studied first under his father, Giovanni Santi, a painter and poet in the court of Urbino’s ruler, and then with the city’s leading painter, Perugino. By 1504, Raphael had settled in Florence, where, like many others, he came under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci. His reputation grew, and in 1508, Raphael was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to decorate the Stanze della Segnatura, a suite of private rooms belonging to the Pope. He was soon put in charge of all papal projects involving architecture, painting, decoration, and the preservation of antiquities. In Rome, Raphael’s art attracted international esteem and demanded extraordinary prices. While living there, he also completed remarkable portraits of the people surrounding the papal court. It was in this later period that he painted La Velata.

During his lifetime, Raphael was tremendously successful and deeply admired. There are many reasons for this, including his profound abilities as a draftsman and “composer” of pictorial elements; his ease at adapting to and assimilating new styles and innovations; his ambition and productivity; and his intellectualism and social skills. Unlike most painters at the time, Raphael wrote sonnets and befriended intellectuals, poets, and writers. These talents coincided with new ideas at the time concerning the role and status of artists, who were no longer viewed simply as trained craftsmen, but rather as professionals in their field. Raphael’s sudden death in 1520, at the age of 37, was said to have “plunged into grief the entire papal court.”

Was She Raphael’s Mistress?

The renowned Italian biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari, who lived two generations after Raphael’s La Velata was made, claimed that the model for the painting was Raphael’s mistress. That opinion stems from the demure eroticism of the portrait and from its likeness to another famous painting by Raphael, La Fornarina, made between 1518 and 1520, which almost certainly does represent the artist’s lover.

Raphael’s La Fornarina shows a woman, nearly nude except for a turban and a diaphanous veil, sitting in a grove of myrtle and laurel trees, which were well-known symbols of sexual desire. On her left arm she wears a type of band usually found on ancient statues of Venus. The band is prominently inscribed with Raphael’s name, suggesting an intimacy between the artist and sitter. But the question of whether the models for La Velata and La Fornarina are the same woman is not easily answered since the two were painted in very different manners. Whereas La Fornarina is filled with details that signal the woman’s relationship with Raphael, La Velata seems to obscure precise identification.

Almost three hundred years later, the famous French artist, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, further perpetuated rumors about Raphael’s amorous affair with La Fornarina. Ingres’ 1814 painting, Raphael and La Fornarina, depicts Raphael and his mistress embracing during a studio modeling session, while a drawing of his muse rests on an easel nearby.

Raphael’s Portraits

It is possible that the woman in Raphael’s La Velata may not represent a specific person at all, but instead an ideal one. Painted portraits in the Renaissance were not always concerned with achieving the true likeness of a person. Like other artists of his time, Raphael believed the painter’s role was not merely to imitate the world as it appeared, but rather to transform and idealize reality using skill and intellect. This idea had a long history, particularly when it came to portraying women. Renaissance painters and poets alike sought to outdo each other when creating—in paint or in words—the most affecting images of beautiful women. Another of Raphael’s well-known portraits embodying the qualities of Renaissance-era portraiture is that of Maddalena Doni (1506), which depicts a recently wedded bride adorned with jewelry and clothing that establishes her social status.

In seeking to capture with paint the “essence” of female beauty, Raphael’s portraits owe much to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting Mona Lisa (1503-1506), which Raphael almost certainly saw and studied. Look closely at the two paintings. In La Velata, Raphael assimilated the Mona Lisa’s pose: including her direct, intimate gaze, and the expressive placement of her hands. All of these details contribute to our sense of her vivid “presence” and her complex inner life. Thus, regardless of who the model for La Velata was, through Raphael’s discerning eye and brush she has been made to embody and bring to life an ideal of female beauty.

The Italian Renaissance

Often considered one of the greatest eras of cultural achievement, the Italian Renaissance (spanning from about the late 1200s to 1600) was characterized by heightened intellectual endeavor, increased private and papal cultural patronage, and innovations in the fields of poetry, literature, philosophy, science, architecture, music, and the fine arts. The word Renaissance (rinasciamento in Italian) translates to “rebirth,” which at the time signaled a renewed interest and commitment to the study of the culture, arts, and humanist philosophy that had earlier emerged during classical antiquity. Although the Renaissance influence spanned throughout Europe, in Italy, the cultural resurgence was centered in the northern region of Tuscany and was eventually felt widely in Rome.

The Italian Renaissance movement in fine art is most often associated with three men—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael—who espoused painting and sculptural techniques emphasizing the idealized human form, the creation of three-dimensional perspective, and balanced spatial harmony. During this period, these artists enjoyed commissions from some of Italy’s wealthiest clients—including the Medici family of Florence and later the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the Medici family, did not originally commission Raphael to paint La Velata, the painting eventually fell into their hands when its original owner Marquis Matteo Botti failed to pay his debts. Since that time, it has been housed at the famous Palazzo Pitti—a vast Renaissance palace in Florence that was once the primary home of the Medici family and the majority of their Renaissance treasures.

The Frame

The study of picture frames in general, and of Renaissance frames in particular, is a discipline in its infancy. Historic frames have always been the poor cousins of important collections of paintings and drawings. Throughout most of the modern era, original frames were discarded whenever a painting changed ownership, and a new frame more suitable to the work of art's new surroundings was provided. Only in the late nineteenth century did museums and private collectors develop an interest in historical authenticity that extended to frames as well as to the objects they contained. By that time, frames more than one or two hundred years old had grown exceedingly rare.

The elaborate frame that encases La Velata actually has a long and interesting history. The painting had for many years been in the collection of the Italian merchant Marquis Matteo Botti, but when Botti failed to pay his debts to his lenders, the Medici Family of Florence stepped in and paid them for him---in exchange for his entire art collection. In 1620, the Medici Family commissioned a craftsman to make this frame for La Velata. Each side of the ornate gold frame is decorated with carved griffins—legendary creatures portrayed with a lion’s body and eagle’s head and wings. The frame also has two hinges on its right side that are still used when the painting is on permanent display at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The hinges allow the painting to be opened like a cabinet for exposure to nearby natural light, thereby allowing copyists a better view of the painting.

Orientation

Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Social, intellectual, and religious unrest transformed European culture in the sixteenth century. Nearly continuous warfare pocked the European continent, and factions and rulers of numerous nation-states vied for power, land, and resources of all kinds, especially economic ones. Advances in cartography, astronomy and navigation led the way in the early period of what we now know as the scientific revolution. The advent of the printing press just a few decades earlier provided an enormous boost to the power of the written word and the advance of literacy and knowledge. The Habsburg (Holy Roman) Empire was widely acknowledged as the greatest power in Europe, if not the world, and yet shifting alliances, diplomatic efforts and military force changed the landscape frequently. The Church was an important player in this scene, wielding power, diplomacy, and military strength of its own. Indulgences (relief from punishment of sins, followed by absolution and forgiveness of sins for the insurance of salvation) were a common practice of the Church for centuries. The popularization that indulgences could be offered in exchange for financial contributions to the Church during the reign of Pope Julius II, Raphael’s patron, became one of the first targets of those within the established Church who began to seek internal reform, later known as the leaders of the Reformation.

Italy in the 16th Century: The High Renaissance

Conceptions of the Renaissance vary widely. This is partly because it represents the burgeoning of so many different areas of knowledge historically, and because it represents such a wide-ranging and complex cultural phenomenon. Thus, it can’t really be unanimously defined. More agreement exists about the Italian High Renaissance, which is said to have begun in the 1490s and lasted until the Sack of Rome in 1527 by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. It is sometimes referred to as the “High Renaissance,” “Imperial Style,” and the “classical phase” of the Renaissance. Ultimately, this style of art—characterized by the advancement of oil as a medium in painting, superseding tempera, as well as a greater understanding of anatomy, Medieval and Renaissance Humanism, and ancient classical art—spread across the rest of Europe (as evidenced by, for example, Rembrandt van Rijn’s collecting Italian Renaissance artworks personally). Another development the Italian High Renaissance is recognized for is the invention of both chiaroscuro (the use of light and dark contrast to create and intensify senses of volume and drama in two-dimensional art) and sfumato (generally, in painting, a lightly tinted varnish used to thinly cover an entire painting, creating a kind of smoky haze that was believed to mimic the quality and effects of light at dusk, the most highly prized light).

Raphael

Born in 1483 in Urbino (northeastern Italy), Raphael arrived in Florence (north-central Italy) in 1504/05, having studied in Perugia (central Italy) under the famed painter Perugino. Raphael became successful very quickly, partly as a result of his widely-admired depictions of the Virgin and Child *(remember that at this time, art as we might conceive it was largely the realm of the Church, though private collecting basically started during the Renaissance). In 1508, Raphael left Florence for Rome, where Pope Julius II put him to work painting his private papal apartments, including the library, or Stanza della Segnatura, one of Raphel’s most famed bodies of work. Raphael continued to work for the successor to Julius II, Pope Leo X, as director of archaeological and architectural projects in Rome. Leo X was a member of the of Medici family, the members of which came to possess The Woman with the Veil in the seventeenth century.

Tour Framework and Questions

Subject

• Who do you think this person in the portrait was?

• How old is she?

• Can you tell when she lived?

• Does anything that the person is wearing give you any clues?

• Besides the person himself/herself, are there any other objects in the portrait that give the viewer any clues? (objects that the person is holding, objects that are in the background, props such as chairs, tables, etc.)

• Does the way the person is standing or sitting tell you anything about them?

Who, What, When, Where and Why

• What does the picture tell you about the time that the subject lived?

• What country might it have been painted in?

• Who do you think it might have been painted for?

• Do you think this is a portrait of someone who paid to have their portrait made, or she a person close to the artist?

• What do you think makes this portrait unique?

Feelings and Emotions

• How does the portrait make you feel?

• What about this portrait interests you? Why?

• How do you think the artist felt about the person he/she painted?

• How do you think the person in the picture is feeling or what is their mood? How can you tell?

Composition

• How has the artist arranged the portrait?

• Do you think the woman posed for this portrait, or do you think the artist might have imagined her?

• Where is the person looking (at the viewer, away, at something else)?

• What does the background and the objects in the background of the picture tell us?

• How much space has the artist left around the person and how is it used?

• What view of the person is pictured? 3/4 view? Full frontal? Profile? Full body? Waist view?

Style of the Portrait

• Is the portrait realistic (looks absolutely real) or are there abstracted or idealized elements (the artist was thinking about something real, but altered the visual reality of the subject in some way)?

Elements and Principles: Shape, Line and Space

• What shapes can you see in this portrait? What shapes do you think Raphael used to create it?

• Are the lines in the portrait straight or curved? Geometric? Organic?

• How often does the artist repeat certain colors or shapes within the portrait?

• What colors does Raphael use most prominently? Least? Are the colors light or dark? What effect(s) does this choice of colors, tints, and shades have on your perception of the painting and the sitter?

Monsters and Maidens: Amphora Pottery of the Art Nouveau Era Tour Blueprint

Exhibition Dates: November 1, 2009-April 11, 2010

Introduction
Between 1892 and 1918 the Amphora Pottery Company manufactured thousands of remarkably imaginative and delicately crafted ceramic vessels in its workshop in Teplitz, Austria. From snarling dragons and sea creatures to medieval maidens and lily pads, the wares of the Amphora pottery makers were influenced by artistic and literary movements ranging from Symbolism and Secessionism to Art Nouveau.

Amphora came about as the result of a rare combination of historical and political events. By the late nineteenth century, the country of Bohemia had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading to an influx of German immigrants. This skilled workforce, combined with Bohemia’s Celtic origins, thousand-year history, and rich culture fueled a creative synergy that led to the birth of the Amphora Company. The firm was established by Alfred Stellmacher in 1860, who was later joined by partners Eduard Stellmacher, Hans and Carl Riessner, Rudolf Kessel, and Ernst Wahliss.

Popularity of Amphora Pottery soared in the late nineteenth century. This was particularly the case in the United States, where world’s fairs and expositions offered increased access to international products, and a burgeoning advertising industry drove demand for innovative art objects. American industrial expansion during this period led to increased wealth and prosperity and the subsequent rise of the middle class. Increasingly, it was this class that purchased decorative pottery to embellish the interiors of their homes.

Like other firms of the period, such as Tiffany Studios, that produced decorative art, Amphora objects remained in private homes until future generations decided to part with them. It is surprising, then, to learn that given the popularity of Amphora during the late nineteenth century, this unique—and sometimes bizarre—form of pottery remains relatively unknown today, except for by a handful of collectors. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view examples from one of the world’s finest Amphora Pottery collections.
By 1850, with rich deposits of exceptional kaolin clay and a large body of skilled workers, Vienna and Western Bohemia were producing huge quantities of exceptional porcelain wares. Teplitz, the home of the Amphora Company, and possibly as many as thirty other pottery companies in the year 1900, was a small picturesque village in northwest Bohemia—now part of the Czech Republic. In 1900 it was considered a tourist destination and visited by well-known figures such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who came to visit the city’s legendary hot springs and baths.

To make Amphora Pottery, a die—or model—must first be carved from modeling clay with knives and scrapers and polished with abrasive rags to make the clay smooth. The model is placed in a high-temperature oven and fired. After it is removed from the oven, the die is used to make a plaster-of-Paris cast. Refined clay would then be swirled about in this cast until it was one-half inch thick. After the refined clay was dry, the cast was removed, additional detailed carving was undertaken, and the model was ready for decorating with colored glazes. The final piece was then subjected to many additional firings depending on the melting temperatures of the glazes.

Female faces were a popular motif in Amphora pottery. Many portrait pieces were influenced by themes and motifs from Symbolist myths, literature, and religion, in which women were portrayed as idealized and magical nymphs, dancers, and virgins. The Amphora Company is known for its respectful portrayal of the female figure from the very start. This comparison shows a photograph of the young model Evelyn Nesbit that her promoter Sanford White used to promote her modeling career. Amphora produced a line of vases using this image of Nesbit.

Amphora Influences
Amphora pottery designs are influenced by such varying art, design, and cultural movements as Rococo, Symbolism, Japonisme, the Vienna Secession, the Pre-Raphaelites, and even the Arts and Crafts Movement and William Morris. Such influences can be seen in the decorative motifs of many of the pieces in the gallery: insects, flowers, female figures, bats,

Labels
1. Figural Ewer, before 1892
2. Vase, circa 1892
3. Untitled, circa 1894
Alfred Stellmacher, often considered the father of Amphora Pottery arrived on the scene in Bohemia around 1860. Many of his earliest pottery designs show influences of the Rococo and Victorian eras, characterized by unrestrained playful and frilly floral motifs. Japanese influences—often referred to as the japonesque—were also prevalent during the early years for the Amphora Company. The objects in this display case represent early Amphora Pottery samples pre-dating the rise of the Art Nouveau style.

1. Western “Cave Dragon” planter, circa 1900
2. Western Dragon vase, circa 1900
3. Venom-spitting Dragon vase, circa 1900
4. Mini-dragon, Salamander, circa 1900
5. Pterodactyl, circa 1900
At the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, the Amphora Company introduced new models that mostly included dragons, animals, bats, and beasts. Dragons—the notorious reptilian creatures with bulky, scaly bodies and wings that were long written about in mythology—were among the most popular animal-like forms depicted in pottery. Western dragons, such as those on view in this display case, were characterized by wedge-shaped heads, four feet, and enormous claws. They were depicted in various colors. These fantastical and bizarre animal representations were precursors to the Grotesque genre that characterized German art of the period 1920—1933.
 
1. Octopus and Crab Vase, circa 1900
2. Mini-monster vase, circa 1900
3. Untitled, circa 1900
“Monsters” from the sea—such as squid, octopus, and crab—were popular motifs for vases that were eagerly sought by collectors enamored with dragon-type imagery.

Spider Woman, circa 1900
Among the most sought-after of Amphora portrait pieces, this rare Spider Woman vase depicts woman with closed eyes and long golden tresses, whose face is framed with a butterfly headdress, golden crown, and a spider web. Four opals have been affixed to further ornament the piece. Compare the Spider Lady from 1900 to the decoration of a vase made with the same mold (above right) to see how both the designer and the chosen materials were crucial to the final outcome of an object.

Summer Queen, circa 1894
Summer Queen is from one of the most well-known lines of Amphora Pottery in the Art Nouveau style. The falcon, long a symbol for intelligence and pride, appears in Arthurian Legends, Irish myths, and the Old Norse Edda. Compare the profile of the woman on the vase to the print by famed Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha (right). Although the profile format is similar, Mucha’s portrait is soft and feminine, while Amphora’s presentation of the woman with a falcon headdress is samurai-like and serious.

Vide Poche (sundries tray), circa 1898-99
One favorite Art Nouveau theme was the figure of a woman with flowers. Around 1900, artists Alphonse Mucha and Jules Cheret helped to popularize the “flower ladies” theme—known at the time as femme fleur—in widely-distributed posters and advertisements. The maiden depicted on this object emerges from a lily pad colored with the green glaze that became known as the signature color of the Amphora Company.

Women in the Storm, circa 1900
In Art Nouveau design, women were often depicted in peril, as the imagery on this vase suggests. A similar motif was employed by Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt in his 1902 Beethoven Frieze (detail at left).

Vase, circa 1900
From 1897-1899, the Amphora Company was at the height of its Art Nouveau production. This vase displays rich colors and exotic water lilies with sinuous handles based on a form designed by Paul Dachsel, one of the partners in the Amphora Company.

Semiramis/The Moth Series, circa 1900
The name Semiramis was given to this series of vases by critics in the early 1900s who associated its ornamentation with Semiramis, the Queen of Assyria. Although collectors have referred to the pieces as “moth vases” for decades, the insects depicted are actually butterflies. German journal articles and reviews from the period always referred to them as schmetterling—which translates to butterfly.

These vases are affixed with gres bijous—porcelain jewels—that were fabricated using clay, glazed with different colors, and then fired before they were cemented into place.

Pelican Planter, circa 1900
This planter, adorned with three birds, provides a fine example of the gres bijou—or porcelain jewelry—technique employed by the Amphora Company. In an effort to add nuance to pottery designs, the company adopted a technique invented by French goldsmith Rene Lalique that used materials such as pearls, ivory, and diamonds to embellish objects. The Amphora Company fabricated faux-porcelain jewels in clay, glazed them, and fired them before affixing them to finished pottery pieces.
 
Bat Planter, circa 1900
The Bat Planter is one of the rarest and most ambitious objects made by the Amphora Company due to its large size and the intricacy of its design and ornamentation. Advertisements for the Bat Planter (left) appeared in many German-language magazines around 1905. Only four examples of this piece are known to remain in the world—one of which is in the National Museum in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

The display of pottery from Austrian firms in the nineteenth-century world fairs marked the entry of Amphora into the American pottery market. In the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the Amphora Company displayed a remarkable selection of unusual wares. Amphora was also presented at the 1895 California Midwinter International Exposition held in San Francisco (seen in the adjacent wall mural). During that era, a great deal of Amphora pottery was sold and distributed to collectors throughout the United States. The Amphora Company’s American distributor was Bawo and Dotter in New York City.

Tour Framework

• Ask guests what kinds of responses the Amphora pottery provokes in them.

• Explain that Amphora Pottery is an important but under-recognized body of ceramic art from the period at the very end of the nineteenth century and the very early years of the twentieth century.

• Ask guests what kinds of motifs they see in the work.

• Explain that Amphora pottery is famed for its motifs of animals, feminine figures (maidens), and dragons (monsters).

• Explain that the pottery is also deeply influenced by the rise of Japonisme, a nineteenth-century development beginning in the 1860s that lead to a meteoric rise in all things Japanese—especially in fine and decorative art. Japanese art was exhibited at the London International Exhibition (1862), the Paris Exhibition Universelle (1867), the Vienna Universal Exhibition (1873), and very widely throughout Europe after 1880.

• Explain that it was the Worlds’ Fairs, in part, that lead to the rise of Art Nouveau, in general, and to Amphora pottery, in particular, at its height.

• Explain that The Worlds’ Columbian Exhibition in Chicago (1893) and the Worlds’ Fair Exhibition Universelle in Paris (1900) both offered enormous numbers of people exposure to Amphora pottery, helping to cement the reputation of the company in the realm of art nouveau.

Rembrandt: The Embrace of Darkness and Light Tour Blueprint

Exhibition Dates: November 7-January 18, 2010

Introduction
Rembrandt: The Embrace of Darkness and Light consists of over one hundred prints made by Rembrandt van Rijn between the years 1627 and 1660, roughly. It is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Major sponsorship of the exhibition is provided by Goldcorp. Additional educational programming support is provided by AT&T Nevada. Additional funding provided by Heidi Loeb, the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Text Panels
Main
In the world of art, the name of Rembrandt (1606–1669) has unparalleled power and appeal. As a painter, he stood at the pinnacle of seventeenth-century European art and dominated the Dutch Golden Age. With a rare genius for psychological insight, he revealed, as had few painters before him, the complexity of the human spirit and the triumph and tragedy of the human condition. But Rembrandt achieved comparable renown in his lifetime for his artistry in an altogether different medium, that of printmaking. Indeed, he numbers among the few great artists to devote nearly equal energy to painting and printmaking. In his thirty-five years of printmaking activity, he worked almost 290 copper plates. Made by means of etching, drypoint, and, to a lesser degree, engraving, his prints brought him international fame and sometimes wealth—and he is hailed by many today as the greatest etcher of all time.

Rembrandt: The Embrace of Darkness and Light features nearly 120 of the artist’s etchings from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibition charts the entire course of Rembrandt’s printmaking career, from the drama and technical prowess of his impatient youth and the unrivaled mastery of his maturity, to the quiet mystery and poetry of his old age. Blessed with an incomparable technical genius and a deep empathy for his fellow men, Rembrandt changed forever the look and feel of the graphic arts. As this exhibition reveals, Rembrandt was an artist who saw himself and his world clearly and directly and conveyed all of it, eloquently, in the dramatic dialogue of darkness and light.

The Young, Ambitious Artist
Rembrandt’s early artistic career unfolded in his hometown of Leiden, Holland, where in about 1626, he produced his first prints. Beginning in 1631, he spent increasing amounts of time in Amsterdam, Europe’s most vibrant commercial center. He went into business there with the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, who provided him with a studio, lodgings, and introductions to patrons. He soon became Amsterdam’s most popular portrait painter, receiving royal commissions from the governor, or Stadhouder, of the Netherlands, Frederik Hendrik. Meanwhile, he entered into collaborative printmaking projects with the Leiden printmaker Johannes van Vliet. In 1634, Rembrandt married Uylenburgh’s cousin Saskia and established his own studio. In both his early paintings and prints, he perfected a High Baroque style marked by heightened emotion and the dramatic use of chiaroscuro (the juxtaposition of intensely lighted and deeply shadowed forms).

Already in his first years as a printmaker, Rembrandt embraced a wide range of subjects, from lofty biblical and mythological themes to portraits and earthy images of everyday life. (In 1641, he added landscapes to his repertoire.) He suffused all of these images with a deep respect and empathy for the human condition.

Young and ambitious, Rembrandt knew that making prints was his means of entry into collections all over Europe. By printing etchings in quantity, he could widely disseminate his artistic inventions, and his prints rapidly found an international following, including markets in France and Italy. Prints also provided Rembrandt with income. Once he had etched a plate, impressions could be printed and sold for many years.

The Artist Obsessed with Fame
By the end of the 1630s, Rembrandt was famous, wealthy, and living like a gentleman. In 1639, he received a major commission for a group portrait of a militia troop, now known as The Night Watch. That same year he bought a large house in Amsterdam with space for his many students. He set up a printmaking studio in it and—avid collector that he was—arranged his own growing collection of art, natural specimens, and curiosities from cultures the world over. In 1641 Saskia gave birth to their beloved son Titus. Despite his successes, sorrow entered Rembrandt’s life in 1642, when Saskia died after a long illness. Thereafter his personal life became increasingly problematic and out-of-step with conventional Dutch society. After Saskia’s death, a widow, Geertje Dircx, arrived to serve as Titus’s nurse and soon became Rembrandt’s mistress. In time, Rembrandt redirected his affections toward a young maid, Hendrickje Stoffels, resulting in lawsuits that led him to have Geertje institutionalized. Rembrandt’s financial situation also worsened. During the 1640s he spent ruinous sums of money on his house and collections. At the same time, his income declined as important patrons, troubled by his lifestyle, started to avoid him. Shifts in the art market also took their toll. Rembrandt’s students became his competitors, some working in his somber style, others adopting the lighter courtly manner popularized by the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. In the face of his many troubles, Rembrandt’s prints only became more masterful, as his technical achievements deepened and his comprehension of the human heart and spirit became ever more profound.

The Mature Artist
For Rembrandt the 1650s were years of unrelenting personal and financial crisis. In 1649, he stopped paying his mortgage. In 1654, the Dutch Reformed Church excommunicated Rembrandt’s mistress Hendrickje Stoffels for being pregnant and unmarried. Two years later, on the day before his fiftieth birthday, Rembrandt filed for bankruptcy. His goods were sold in a series of auctions lasting three years. Among his personal items inventoried at the time were albums, folders, and baskets of prints by other artists, which he had lovingly collected at great cost over the preceding decades. In 1658 he stopped producing prints in quantity. Perhaps lacking a printing press, he would etch only four more plates before his death in 1669 at age sixty-three.

Despite the gloom of his final period, Rembrandt continued to produce masterpieces. Indeed, his troubles seemed only to deepen the emotional resonance of his later prints, culminating in a series of etchings that serve as intense reveries on life’s most vital forces. Rembrandt’s technical experiments and achievements also heightened the poetry of his later work. Through the special inking of individual impressions from his copper plates and his use of different papers, the artist attained a new range of atmospheric subtlety and emotional nuance as he explored the many possibilities inherent in a single image. One need only compare the two impressions of The Entombment and of Christ Preaching, on view in this gallery, to sense the extraordinary variety of tone and mood that the artist teased out of mere ink and paper.

Rembrandt and the Art of Printmaking
Etching
Rembrandt approached etching with an extraordinary freedom and spontaneity, treating varnished copper plates like sheets of paper on which he rapidly sketched his designs. He quickly discovered he could make finer lines than he could with a pen and explored darkness with inks blacker than any painting.

To produce an etching, an artist first coats a copper plate with an acid-resistant coating such as wax or varnish. This layer is called a ground, and the artist uses a needle to scratch through it, exposing the copper as he draws the lines of his design. The plate is then exposed to acid, which eats away or “bites” at the copper where the needle has exposed it. Through biting, the lines become actual grooves in the surface of the plate. The ground is then removed and the copper plate inked and wiped clean, leaving ink only in the grooves.

To print the plate’s design, a press forces dampened paper down into the grooves of the plate to pick up the ink. When peeled away from the plate, the paper reveals a print in mirror image of the inked design. The plate can then be inked and printed again.

Drypoint
About 1640, Rembrandt explored a new dimension in his printmaking as he made expanded use of the drypoint technique to enhance the shading of his etchings and add even richer atmospheric and tonal effects. Rembrandt quickly became a master of the drypoint technique, achieving a visual range and level of optical nuance and subtlety that few artists have come close to rivaling.

With drypoint the artist scratches directly into the copper plate. As his needle incises the plate, it raises up ridges of fine metal fragments, called “burr,” along the edges of the furrows. The ink caught in the burr creates a blurred and velvety effect when printed.

Rembrandt’s Studio: A Cabinet of Curiosities
Throughout his artistic career, Rembrandt established and worked in many different studios. This loosely-interpreted re-creation of Rembrandt’s studio is from a period in the artist’s life during which he had achieved great wealth from his wife Saskia’s dowry and the sale of his artwork.

Along with the tools needed for making art, Rembrandt’s studio was filled with an astonishing collection of objects, including antiquities, stuffed animals, armor, marble busts, coins, shells, and coral. The variety of objects in his kunstcaemer—also known as a cabinet of curiosities—is testimony to the significance of the Age of Exploration and to Rembrandt’s inquisitive nature and success as an artist.

The Dutch Gable
The design of the faux architectural structure in the gallery is loosely based on seventeenth-century Dutch architecture that incorporated a feature known as a Dutch Gable. Typically a decorative convention, a Dutch Gable is one whose sides have a shape made from two curves with a pediment at the top. Use of Dutch Gables first emerged during the Renaissance, and were eventually absorbed into the Baroque Style.

Tour Framework
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669. RvR was born on or about July 15, 1606. However, several public records indicate discrepancies in Rembrandt’s own hand that suggest he may have been born in 1605 or 1607. Rembrandt’s parents were the miller Harmen Gerritsz. Van Rijn (1567-1630) and the baker’s daughter Deeltgen Willemsdr. Van Zuytbrouck (c. 1568-1640). He was the ninth of ten children, three of whom died in infancy. While his elder brothers entered the family trades, Rembrandt was given an education that would have enabled him to work outside of these constraints—he chose, however, to leave his education behind and apprentice to Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburg in Leiden and later (c. 1625) to Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam.

The Netherlands
In 1600 the Dutch Republic was an opaque, complex system of local and regional governing bodies, which Rembrandt both carefully and at times carelessly navigated.
RvR’s hometown of Leiden was proud of its history (bloody, in relation to independence from Spanish rule); its University and its textile manufacturing. Leiden was associated with perseverance, bravery, and victory (following the 1574 battle of the 80 Years’ War).

The Work
Rembrandt scholars are an argumentative bunch: they agree, generally, however, on the attribution to Rembrandt of 285 etchings, 875 (of 1,595) drawings, and 250 (of 400) paintings. RvR, like Caravaggio, was said “to respect no master but Nature”—but he had extensive collections of Italian art and some of his own countrymen as well, including as many as 9,000 works on paper in his studio by the time of his bankruptcy in 1656. In an inventory of his studio created that year, Rembrandt listed eight paintings by or after six different sixteenth-century Italian painters. RvR’s highly conscious use of dark and light in constructing compositions was inspired by Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) Madonna of the Rosary, even though he hadn’t studied Caravaggio except through his contemporaries’ distillations of Caravaggio’s style.

Antwerp Master Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) would have been the only other impressor besides Lucas van Leyden and Maarten van Heemskerck. RvR identifid with Peter Paul Rubens, but also competed with him. RvR was also, interestingly, fascinated by miniature paintings of Mughal court of India—and as it turns out, it was in the Mughal Courts of India that the Hooka or Hookah was invented, and why one is included in Colin’s recreation of Rembrandt’s studio.

Themes
Art and Faith
When Rembrandt’s grandparents were born in the 1530s, the art world of Leiden was by and large an adjunct to church life. Workshops of stained-glass artists, weavers of textiles and tapestries, sculptors in wood and stone, gold- and silversmiths, cabinetmakers and of course painters found the largest market for their skills in the church and its donors. Art itself was sacred, finding its meaning in Catholic dogma, ritual and spirituality. Artists were hired explicators of these values. On August 26, 1566, however, all changed--a day of iconoclasm in Leiden, changed the art market in the city (and throughout the country) overnight.

As far as is known, not a single painting or print by Rembrandt was painted for a church or placed in one in his lifetime. In the era of the Reformation, then, the Catholic church and liturgy had claimed a position of intermediary between people and the Bible (because of Latin’s prominence in the liturgy), direct connection to the Bible became increasingly important to Protestants—and the narratives of its contents were represented in art, which Protestants still collected widely, perhaps even more so than in the pre-Reformation era, as did Catholics and Jews.

In addition to faith, the theme of people and God is omnipresent in Rembrandt’s work, as it is in the work of many Renaissance artists. For example, in many of the biblical prints, including one of the most important, The Descent from the Cross, is a figure that is based on Rembrandt’s own image (see the man on the ladder). RvR could have ben a relative if not a member of the Holy Family. In his imagination he lived with Mary, Joseph, and Jesus all his life, from his first etchings to his final paintings. Although he painted one group family portrait, but repeatedly created images of families from scripture. Themes of the nativity, the adoration of the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi,, the circumcision, the presentation in the Temple, the angel appearing to Joseph in a dream, the fight into Egypt, Christ’s many ministries, and many more are very common. The Hundred Guilder print, or Christ among the sick, allowing the children to come to him, is based on Chapter 19 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew.

Family, Loved Ones, Households
Saskia Uylenburgh shared Rembrandt’s life for nearly ten—wonderfully happy and bitterly sad—years. She and RvR lost three children before the age of 2 months before their fourth child, Titus, survived to adulthood. However, Saskia herself died after Titus was barely nine months old. Female figures resembling Saskia in RvR’s work are prominent in this period of 1634-1642. Rembrandt was 36 years old, Saskia 30, when she died.

In 1649, Hendrickje Stoffels, a 23-year-old maid, moved into Rembrandt’s home, where he, aged 43, was already engaged in an affair with another household servant, Geertge Dircx, who eventually was locked in a penal institution.

Hendrickje was RvR’s common-law wife, as he would have had to pay a large party of what he was worth to Saskia’s family, and to his own, upon remarriage.

Hendrickje gave RvR everything, had a daughter named Cornelia, and then she too died, from an outbreak of plague, in 1663, aged 37.

Craft
Drawing
RvR made thousands of drawings using Quill pens; Reed pens; Ink and ink wash (applied with brushes, as opposed to pens) of two kinds: bistre (made from chimney root) and iron gall ink (made with iron sulfate and the insect-derived galls of oak, oak-apple and pistachio trees). He rarely used black, or India ink, except in replicating the Mughal drawings he acquired. He occasionally used white opaque watercolor, but frequently relied on black chalk, charcoal, red chalk, and occasionally a medium known as silverpoint. NOTE THAT RvR DID NOT USE lead pencil, white chalk, crayon or watercolor.

Etching
All the prints attributed to Rembrandt are intaglio prints printed from a metal plate.
81 of Rembrandt’s copperplates have survived. He used hammers and burnishers to re-work areas he had already incised but found unsatisfactory. Primarily he used copper plates. Artists, including RvR, would frequently print multiple plates at the same time, cutting the full sheets into their individual prints to get more money out of each pull of the press, which is why many of the prints in this exhibition are so small, and without much paper border.

Rembrandt used his own recipe for the ground he applied to the plate: “half an ounce of Expoltum [asphaltum] burnt of Amber, one ounce of Virgins’ wax, [and] half an once of Mastick,” to be mashed, heated and mixed with water into a ball, then to be melted onto the (not too hot) plate. This would have been known as a soft ground. He used a different ground if he was working the plate multiple times as in the case of Angel Appearing to the shepherds. He needed a transparent ground, called stopping out varnish, for which he had another recipe: “white turpentine oil, add half as much turpentine, put together in a glass bottle, bottle in pure water, boil water for half an hour.” By 1655, he was rarely using a ground at all…ever, and instead working more directly on the plate using the technique of drypoint. RvR utilized the additional intaglio printmaking medium of engraving, but only as an addendum to etching and drypoint.

Chiaroscuro
This method of creating strong contrasts between light and dark grew out of the Renaissance, technically, but had important roots in ancient Greek and Byzantine art. For RvR, it was said, “…so broad was his palette of light and dark, which covers the entire spectrum…Rembrandt does not draw surface compositions in light and dark; he molds them spatially. He was practically a sculptor in light and dark.” In his work, in particular, note the implementation of dark foreground figures against lighter backgrounds, as well as figurative shadows that help to convey a sense of movement or motion, and which help to heighten the illusion of depth. RvR’s play with darkness and light is an application of chiaroscuro as a device for composing in dark and light. This principle, turned into a trademark in early seventeenth-century Italy by Elsheimer and Caravaggio, was available to all seventeenth-century artists and was applied in one form or another by most. Rembrandt practiced a pronouncedly spatial variety of chiaroscuro. He uses it as an organizational device less on the picture plan than in the picture space.

Rembrandt’s Studio
Rembrandt’s studios were in his home. He had an “art room” that would have been for entertaining customers. Upstairs in his home were two studios, one smaller and one larger, as well as a “studio storage space” on the upper floor.

The Studio was a working studio—he taught fairly large numbers of apprentices there, as well as using it for the creation of his own work and storage of his enormous collections. (See notes about the Cabinet of Curiosities.)

Non Finito
Rembrandt was able to project what looked like completely detailed representations with mixed and sometimes minimal means. Regularly, however, he stopped short of that point, leaving the viewer with a work of art that is not a convincing image of reality. In doing so, he goes beyond the ideal of illusion as the ultimate aim of art…Rembrandt printed such impressions of many of his etchings while working, but rather than throw them away when he had used them to move on to the next stage, he created a saleable group of prints, turning them into a “state.” In other words, he assigned artistic and commercial value to these images as they appear, in all their apparent incompleteness. For this reason, they must be regarded as full-fledged creations by Rembrandt and not simply as unfinished works. Were it not for the actual images, this is a practice that might seem considerably more modern than we might associate with RvR’s time.

Rembrandt’s Livelihood
As a member of the Amsterdam guild of St. Luke, Rembrandt was bound by certain non-competition stipulations. In his early years in the city, this will not have bothered him. In his good years, Rembrandt’s high-priced sales and purchases had a buoyant effect on the art market. When the tide turned, his insolvency depressed it. He began to lose everything in the 1650s as a result of many factors.

Over his career, RvR earned an average of 270 guilders for paintings, with a median of 90 guilders…the average income at the time for professional workers might have been 500 guilders (maybe $12,000 of today’s American money). RvR averaged about 2,000 guilders income annually through his lifetime—but this was not evenly distributed, remember.

Prints were less expensive—one to eight stuivers (and there were 20 stuivers to the guilder). Christ Among the Sick, however, is colloquially called “The Hundred-Guilder Print.” It may or may not have actually sold for such a sum—as RvR, like many artists, was good at spinning tales of his own successes. Of interest with the etched portraits that were commissioned—sometimes the price included the plate in the sale to the commissioner.

Rembrandt also made considerable income from tuition fees paid by students apprenticing in his studio. His contemporaries event complained because in good years he made as much as 2,000 guilders in tuition expenses alone.

RvR had some investments as well, but not many. Those he had were in the stocks of the imperial powers of the Dutch West India Company and other Dutch trading companies. All began to change, however, with the downturn resulting from the First English War of 1651-54. In fact, Dutch art would never really recover completely from the effects of this.

Rembrandt, Reading and Writing
Classical texts of all kinds were widely available in Dutch in the 1600s. After his major commissioned paintings of the late 1630s, Rembrandt had written to the commissioner of the works: “The greatest and the most natural (e)motion has been expressed.”: consternation has existed for centuries over the meaning—is it physical movement or the power to move the viewer’s emotions that he means? Rembrandt was, like many in the Renaissance, familiar with a great deal of ancient Greek and Roman writing. Of particular interest was the work of the rhetorician QUINTILIAN, who formulates the rhetorical conviction that the orator who wants to move his public should first be moved himself. Of interest: REMBRANDT INCLUDES HIMSELF IN THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS TO APPEAL TO THIS RHETORICAL STRATEGY: HE”S THERE, SO ARE WE.

Reading and writing, and their affiliated instruments—namely books, pens, and paper—figure prominently in RvR’s work. He was praised and discussed by more poets and playwrights than any other Dutch artist of his day. His closest personal friend was probably the poet Jeremias de Decker, who wrote about Rembrandt’s ability to bring the words of the Bible to life through his art.

Landscape
Two-thirds of all of Rembrandt’s landscapes were made in just seven years, between 1649 and 1655. Rembrandt’s style of landscape, however, changed the course of Dutch landscape art for centuries: picturesque decay, dilapidation, ruins, and farmhouses in disrepair, to name a few elements. Rembrandt’s landscapes are not frequently natural scenes alone, either—they are almost always inhabited landscapes, with evidence of peoples’ use of the land almost always present.

People
Medea: Or the Marriage of Jason and Creusa
Inscription reads: “Creus’ and Iason here plight their toth to one another:
Medea, Iason’s wife, unworthily shunted off to the side, is infuriated by sorrow; she is driven by vengeance. Alas! Infidelity, how dearly are you paid!"

Rembrandt’s and his contemporary Jan Six, who wrote a play about Medea, altered the representation of Medea from the standard negative ones of the myth involving her.
RvR found street merchants of significant interest in the 1630s: rat poison and pancake peddling that appear to be lively scenes of daily life; they are carefully composed scenes, however, based on preceding imagery.

Beggars become an important precursor to his Christian imagery later in his career, and change the nature of Dutch art’s representations and treatment of the dispossessed.
The Flight into Egypt (1627) also represents the most deeply dispossessed: Joseph, Mary and the baby Christ.

Himself
RvR created images of himself in the guise of or closely related to the artist Lucas van Leyden (a close friend); Peter Paul Rubens; the poet Ludovico Ariosto; military men; cavaliers; burghers; officials; industrialists; as a participant in a martyrdom; as Christ himself in a scene of the Crucifixion; to exotic personages; to character types and beggars. He seems to look into the mirror repeatedly and see not just himself but also reflections of others.

Conclusion
RvR is one of the seminal figures in the history of art. He changed the course of Dutch art, particularly in his landscapes, and employed the techniques of chiaroscuro in ways that affected artists’ use of the technique for generations after him. He brought its use into the realm of the creation of space in the picture, not just compositional elements of light and dark—that is, his use of chiaroscuro, largely through the printmaking techniques of drypoint, etching, and surface wiping create the illusion of space and in many cases movement in his pictures, whereas before his perfection of these techniques, the effects of chiaroscuro were more limited to the composition of the image and the surface treatment of the image.
RvR had an extraordinary life, and he also suffered greatly. His work and life represent the apex of the Dutch Age of Exploration and Dutch art, but the end of his career and life also signify a shift in the prominence of Dutch art and empire after the 1650s.