Art Term Papers - Self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

Possibly the only way to free, the real Vincent Van Gogh from the creation of so many others, is to study the immense mass of work he has left behind. His art is on exhibition at museums including the Musems in Boston and New York. In accretion to his art, all of Van Gogh’s letters remain all translated into English. Vincent would turn that which had caused him so much discomfort, his overflowing heart, towards canvas. In duration of ten years, most of which he was sick, Van Gogh produced some 800 paintings and a related number of drawings.

His early work delineates humble subjects, peasants generally, with a gentle hand that at times rivals his idol, Jean Francois Millet. His middle years are portraits, room settings, and still lifes of flowers with such vigor it seems the artist had seized a piece of the sun and used in his palate. In his last years, after admitting himself into sanitarium in St. Remy, the sun went inside Vincent, and he fabricated conceivably his best work. No artist with so much belief in himself ever experienced such downfall.

Vincent Van Gogh transacted only one painting during his lifetime. Following the death of Vincent, and his brother Theo, who was buried alongside him a year later, his painting of Iris’s would sell for a record figure of $75,000,000. Vincent van Gogh had a deep enthusiasm for art. In actuality, one can go so far as to say that Van Gogh was a man of superlative passions in essentially each and every aspect of his life, his art, his relationships and the gratification that he sought.

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

This painting is one of the most critiqued and scrutinized of Van Gogh’s entire works. And understandably so. Vincent van Gogh spent years in the quest of a life in the ministerial and had sustained an emotional attraction in the direction of religion. Still Life with Bible marks an exciting point in Van Gogh's career not only in view of the fact that it remains one of his finest accomplished early paintings, but also by reason of that it furnishes unmistakable insights into the artist’s feelings of religion and of the chaos within his own family.

Rembrandt’s pleasantly puzzling painting style has stirred the imagination of art lovers during his lifetime and ever since. Rembrandt’s pictorial intentions and the diversity of materials and techniques he put to use to bring into being his engaging effects is unfastened in depth.

In art-historical research, the work of art as a tangible object is used increasingly as a significant source of information connected with the painting itself, as well as about historic studio practice in general. Rembrandt van Rijn was born on July 15, 1606, in Leiden, the Netherlands.
His father was a Miller who wanted his son to get an education and accomplish professional prosperity, so Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leiden, where he studied science and anatomy; it was there he acquired the knowledge of the human anatomy which would help him immensely during his artist’s career.

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

Over the years, Rembrandt had become habitual to living in comfort, if not farther his means and the debts had been piling up. He became a teacher to supplement the household income but this did not help, and there was lesser demand for his work. In order to make ends meet, Rembrandt had to sell various of his paintings, some furniture, until inevitably, even the house was auctioned off. In 1658, the family moved to a smaller home where Hendrickje and Titus decided to guard Rembrandt’s leftover and future canvasses from the creditors by starting their own art dealership, for which Rembrandt was only an employee, consequently not owning the works he created while in the company’s service.

Hendrickje Stoffels died in the year 1663. Rembrandt, who was no alien to calamity and misfortune, continued painting. The self-portraits he created in the middle of this dark period in his life only serve to remind us of the sorrow and hopelessness in his heart. Maybe he desired to shift his misfortune onto the canvases, as a form of exorcism, or are the portraits only a mirror held up by a man trying to look into his own soul for explanation.

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

Vincent van Gogh painted 24 self-portraits during a two-year stay in Paris. In this self-portrait, the Dutch artist employed Seurat’s dot technique. Though what for Seurat was a procedure fixed on science became in van Gogh's hands a fierce emotional language. Here the red and green dots are disturbing and totally in harmony with the nervous tension apparent in van Gogh’s gaze. Such self-portraits divulge the deep distress and failure of a gifted man, whose odyssey in search of acceptance and peace of mind is vigorously expressed in his work.

We know a lot about Rembrandt from his self-portraits; he was the first artist to make the self-portrait a major means of artistic assertion. The series began with the representation of a powerful roughneck, passes through confident celebrity, and ends with the piercing visions of a single old man.
A combination of rendition and scholarship will pleasure those for whom Rembrandt is the most magnificent and human of all artists.

Each artist is an individual with a particular style, and in spite of the fact that these styles can be similar in practice the distinctiveness of the artist often proves the discriminating factor for a prosperous artwork. Self-portraits are favorable when looking at the individualism of the artist, as there are two aspects to look at the artist’s style, and the artist’s view of himself. The latter can furnish a brief understanding into the mental situation of the artist as well as any obvious influencing contingency of the artwork. This view can often also embody fragmental insights into the society and culture of the time. Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent van Gogh are two painters who are well symbolized by this assertion.
Rembrandt was born into a Dutch society of the Baroque era. This time period affected his style of artwork strongly as these were the Post-High Renaissance years. This meant that the acclaimed artworks of the society at the time were religiously rooted works shaped by the efforts of the Reformation, which was also befalling at the time. This meant that Rembrandt painted his works employing religious artwork methods such as the art of chiaroscuro, strategically planning the composition of light and dark to give the figures an illuminated or sacred appearance. Consequently when Rembrandt painted self-portraits he carried over these methods, painting himself in this almost holy presence with the use of chiaroscuro. The self-portraits show a boundless eloquence that makes the works flourishing.

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

Rembrandt longed to be like his Renaissance predecessors, frequently painting himself in the garments and fashion trends of the Renaissance era. The most common of these picturesque garments were the general Berets that have now been commonly allied with the common artist as a conventionalized idea. The work provides an understanding into Rembrandt’s listlessness to self-consciousness he plainly strive for genuinity in his works and found no reason to change the physical reality of his work for mere aesthetic purposes. It provides an understanding into the culture of the time with the fashion state Rembrandt has portrayed himself in as well as the common chiaroscuro methods put to use in the painting which were common for the culture or society of the time.

Van Gogh, like Rembrandt, was born into a Dutch society though into the Post-Impressionist period of art. Unlike Rembrandt’s holy theme, van Gogh’s works were not fixed on a particular society inclination. His subjects were fixed on raw passion and were stated through vibrant colour and brush strokes. This procedure established fascinating when put to use to his self-portraits. The somewhat wild strokes appear displaced from up-close but from a length they integrate into a meaningful, more than often-successful artwork. Looking at the self-portrait from 1887 one can see how van Gogh has endeavored to magnify the face and the assertion on it, especially by applying a divergence of color and condensed brush strokes. This work exhibits a semblance to self-portraits by Rembrandt as the focus of the work is on the face, and the way this focus is constructed is by the distribution of light and dark in the picture. They vary in that Rembrandt’s procedure is the more tone rooted chiaroscuro practice, and van Gogh plainly illuminates the strokes from the face producing a lighted effect.

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites

The work depicts an imprecise image of van Gogh’s appearance, the deficiency of severe realism with van Gogh’s technique means that a completely precise depiction of his distinctiveness cannot be dispensed as in Rembrandt’s portraits. Van Gogh’s painting methods also present an insight as it shows how the society at the time more readily recognized alteration from conventional art practice. Van Gogh and Rembrandt’s self-portraits can be weigh against candidly due to their eloquence, society representation and the mutual technique they appear to share. Their artworks not only mirror their distinctiveness but also furnish fragmental understanding into the society and culture of the society in which they lived.

 

Click Here To View Top Term Papers Sites