Onno Blom’s biography of the young Rembrandt plays this game of artistic nature versus nurture to fascinating effect. It is a book that sets itself a conundrum: 'How did Rembrandt become Rembrandt?' ... Blom necessarily has much more to say about the painter’s nurture than his nature ... Blom’s method is persuasive: he follows the painter around Leiden’s streets and over its bridges (145 of them, he says) to recreate the world that shaped him. As a result, the book is a biography of the city too ... Rembrandt would develop into the great Everyman of art. If, as Blom so elegantly shows, Leiden set him up for great things it was in Amsterdam that he was to realise them.
Blom is an indefatigable researcher, and he has made every effort to inspect any scrap of paper that documents Rembrandt’s existence between his birth in 1606 and his final departure for Amsterdam in 1631 ... The problem with writing a full-length book about a figure whose early life is sketchy is that the author is obliged to pad. Young Rembrandt has a chapter on a siege of Leiden by Spanish forces in 1574, more than 30 years before the artist’s birth ... Lacking concrete details of the artist’s daily life, a biographer is tempted to fall back on the hypothetical ... Such speculations aside, “Young Rembrandt” holds a wealth of historical tidbits about daily life in early 17th-century Holland ... If Young Rembrandt does not wholly succeed in its quest to reanimate the young man setting out on the path that would bring him fame, Blom’s book does offer a tantalizing glimpse of the artist’s first steps.
The book’s strength does not lie in art historical investigation. It is at its best when describing the city of Leiden and providing a wide background panorama to Rembrandt’s early life ... There are some translational oddities in the book, and some wince-making clichés: 'Rembrandt’s self-portraits are windows into his soul,' etc. The author can be irritating ... However, Young Rembrandt is well researched and it certainly widens our understanding of the local historical context. The illustrations are beautiful.
Blom reconstructs a 17th-century Leiden that feels lived in by the painter and the author at once ... Leiden’s classicists, botanists and bibliophiles are evoked too. As is the city’s aesthetic influence, which has been translated elegantly by Beverley Jackson ... The style of Young Rembrandt is often a sort of evocative narrative time travel. It’s rich, and it needs to be, considering how little incident there is which isn’t simply context. But these imaginative evocations run into trouble when they double up as argument ... When Blom speculates what pasta dish the Neapolitan wife of Rembrandt’s instructor might have cooked, he seems almost to be parodying this woolly approach ... Blom is an insightful art critic, especially when he dips into blockbusters of Rembrandt’s maturity ... There is only so much to be made from lacunae that amount to the artist’s entire early career. To that end, a book that plugged holes in our understanding not with imaginative historical projection, but with Blom’s life-long relationship with the painter, might have been more fitting.
It is heavily illustrated, with 100 colour photographs placed throughout the text, in a neat, reader-friendly format. Unfortunately, at least three full-page digital images have been enlarged beyond their capacity, resulting in an ugly break-up of legibility ... Young Rembrandt is really a historical memoir of the city of Leiden, written by a Dutch author seeking to explain the artist through the context of his native city ... Blom’s strategy of digression is by now the warp and weft of his text: he gives us a potted history of Leiden University, its library, its botanical garden, its collection of curiosities, its anatomy theatre and its most famous alumni ... Young Rembrandt seems to have been built upon the theory that if you describe everything around your subject, you will somehow illuminate the mysterious centre. But it doesn’t work: Rembrandt is still the dark star at the hub of the Dutch art world.
Drawing on the significant resources of the Rembrandt Research Project, Rembrandt Documents Project, and the multivolume Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings as well as histories and archival material, Blom offers an assured, discerning biography ... Blom details the nitty-gritty of making art, such as the complicated, time-consuming process of grinding pigments and improvising paint tubes from knotted pig bladders ... A fresh, well-researched, nuanced portrait.
Art critic Blom (The Scar of Death) employs Rembrandt’s early works and the history of his hometown of Leiden, Netherlands, to trace the Dutch painter’s artistic evolution from student to legendary master in this thoughtful, illuminating work ... This portrait will delight both casual art fans and connoisseurs alike.
