Bob Haak | |
---|---|
Born | 22 January 1926 Amsterdam |
Died | 15 May 2005 Amsterdam |
Nationality | Netherlands |
Bob Haak (22 January 1926 – 15 May 2005) was a Dutch art historian known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.
The Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) is an initiative of the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), which is the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Its purpose is to organize and categorize research on Rembrandt, with the aim of discovering new facts about this Dutch Golden Age painter and his studio. The project was started in 1968, but has since become the authority on Rembrandt and has final say in whether a painting is genuine.
From 1954-1963 he worked in the department of paintings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. From 1963 he was curator at the Amsterdam Museum, the museum which today is still the formal owner of the Rembrandt paintings on show at the Rijks, including The Night Watch . In 1956 he worked on the Rembrandt commemorative exhibition in the Rijks, where certain paintings were on show which hadn't been back to Amsterdam for decades, such as the pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit. [1] It was during this project that involved leading Rembrandt experts that Haak first got the idea to start a research project to assist in correct attributions. It was his opinion that much of Rembrandt's attributed work at that time was in fact the work of prominent Rembrandt pupils, each of whom deserved attention for their own qualities and achievements. The pressure to keep a Rembrandt attribution was (and still is) often too high however to do much about it.
The Amsterdam Museum, until 2011 called the Amsterdams Historisch Museum, is a museum about the history of Amsterdam. Since 1975, it is located in the old city orphanage between Kalverstraat and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal.
Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch, is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best known painting in its collection. The Night Watch is one of the most famous Dutch Golden Age paintings.
The pendant portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of full-length wedding portraits by Rembrandt. They were painted on the occasion of the marriage of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit in 1634. Formerly owned by the Rothschild family, they became joinedly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of €160 million, a record for works by Rembrandt.
In 1968 he co-founded the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), together with Josua Bruyn, Jan van Gelder, Jan Emmens, Simon Levie, and Pieter J.J. van Thiel. The project’s aim was a comprehensive study of all of Rembrandt’s paintings and resolving the uncertainties surrounding the authenticity of many paintings, to which several scholars had turned their attention. That was the same year that Horst Gerson published his Rembrandt catalog raisonné, 1968, in which he drastically reduced the number of Rembrandt paintings to 420. The next year, in 1969 Gerson published an update of Abraham Bredius' 1935 catalog of 611 Rembrandt paintings with his attributions based on connoiseurship. Haak responded in 1969 by publishing his bestselling work Rembrandt : His Life, His Work, His Time in three languages. Though this book only included less than a third of the paintings mentioned in Bredius' 1935 work, it also included several works by contemporary artists and several drawings and etchings by Rembrandt that had previously not been published. It changed the way Rembrandt scholars viewed his paintings by putting them into the perspective of other contemporary works by Rembrandt and his pupils, whether it be etchings, drawings, or everyday political events. The scholarly rivalry continued during the course of the 1970s, but there was increasing pressure to publish catalogs and the long-awaited results of the RRP were published in three volumes as A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings between 1982 and 1989.
Pieter J.J. van Thiel (1928–2012) was a Dutch art historian known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.
Horst Gerson (1907–1978) was a German-Dutch art historian.
The following is a list of paintings by Rembrandt in order of appearance, that were attributed as autograph by Horst Gerson in 1968.
The declaration that the work was not done however, coming on top of controversies in the art world caused by the publications, resulted in friction in the team. Team member Ernst van de Wetering advocated a different approach based on a holistic study of the paintings, dismissing the age-old ideas of connoiseurship that were seen as being so controversial in favor of using non-controversial forensic techniques as well as archival research and provenance records. Haak was no stranger to the holistic approach in his study of Rembrandt's contemporaries and pupils. In 1982 he published The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, which was equally as well-received as his first book on Rembrandt and earned him the Karel van Mander prize in 1985.
Ernst van de Wetering is a Dutch art historian and an expert on Rembrandt and his work.
However, differences of opinion within the team came to a head in 1993, when Haak withdrew from the RRP, along with Bruyn, Levie, and Van Thiel. They left the further organization of the project to their fellow team member Ernst van de Wetering, who continued to publish another three volumes, finishing with the sixth volume which included a list of 348 autograph paintings in 2014.
Haak was the son of Jur Haak and Jet van Eek. His father was a footballer in the Dutch national team, and a record high jumper and both parents were teachers at the Montesorri school in Amsterdam. The whole family was active in the resistance during the German occupation. In August 1943, Bob was arrested while trying to deliver a Jan Campert book to some family friends. The Nazis raided his parents house that night and, finding falsified documents (though failing to find the two Jewish people in hiding in the house), deported them to separate concentration camps. His mother died of "malaria" in Reichenbach in December 1944, his father died of exhaustion in Sachsenhausen in January 1945.
Jur Haak was a Dutch male footballer. He was part of the Netherlands national football team, playing 2 matches and scoring 2 goals. He played his first match on 17 November 1912.
The Montessori Method of Education, developed by Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. Montessori's method has been used for over 100 years in many parts of the world.
Despite being neutral, the Netherlands in World War II was invaded by Nazi Germany on 10 May 1940, under orders of Adolf Hitler. On 15 May 1940, one day after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Dutch government and the royal family saved themselves by going to London. Princess Juliana and her children moved on to Canada for additional safety.
The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to arts and history in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw.
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, was a Dutch Golden Age painter and a favourite student of Rembrandt. He was also an etcher, an amateur poet, a collector and an adviser on art.
Jozef Israëls was a Dutch painter. He was a leading member of the group of landscape painters referred to as the Hague School and, during his lifetime, "the most respected Dutch artist of the second half of the nineteenth century".
Jan Asselijn, was a Dutch Golden Age painter.
Jan Lievens was a Dutch Golden Age painter who was associated with his close contemporary Rembrandt, a year older, in the early parts of their careers. They shared a birthplace in Leiden, training with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam, where they shared a studio for about five years until 1631. Like Rembrandt he painted both portraits and history paintings, but unlike him Lievens' career took him away from Amsterdam to London, Antwerp, The Hague and Berlin.
Belshazzar's Feast is a painting by Rembrandt housed in the National Gallery, London. The painting is Rembrandt's attempt to establish himself as a painter of large, baroque history paintings. The date of the painting is unknown, but most sources give a date between 1635 and 1638.
Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers was a Dutch painter and printmaker of the Dutch Golden Age. He was "the most inspired, experimental and original landscapist" of his period and an even more innovative printmaker.
Museum Bredius is a museum named after Abraham Bredius on the Lange Vijverberg in The Hague. It is remarkable for its collection of etchings and paintings, but is most attractive to visitors for its accurate restoration of the 18th-century Herenhuis interior with period furnishings.
The Polish Rider is a seventeenth-century painting, usually dated to the 1650s, of a young man traveling on horseback through a murky landscape, now in The Frick Collection in New York. When the painting was sold by Zdzisław Tarnowski to Henry Frick in 1910, there was consensus that the work was by the Dutch painter Rembrandt. This attribution has since been contested, though this remains a minority view.
Philosopher in Meditation is the traditional title of an oil painting in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, that has long been attributed to the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt.
The dozens of self-portraits by Rembrandt were an important part of his oeuvre. Rembrandt created approaching one hundred self-portraits including over forty paintings, thirty-one etchings and about seven drawings; some remain uncertain as to the identity of either the subject or the artist, or the definition of a portrait.
Self-portrait wearing a white feathered bonnet is an oil painting attributed to the Dutch painter Rembrandt. It is signed and dated 1635. It was traditionally regarded as a Rembrandt self-portrait until 1968, when it was rejected on stylistic grounds in the Rembrandt catalogue raisonné by Horst Gerson. On 18 March 2013 it was re-attributed to the master by Ernst van de Wetering. It is one of over 40 painted self-portraits by Rembrandt.
The Shipbuilder and his Wife is a 1633 painting by Rembrandt. The sitters were identified in 1970 as Jan Rijcksen (1560/2-1637) and his wife Griet Jans Rijcksen. Rijcksen was a shareholder in the Dutch East India Company, and became its master shipbuilder in 1620. The painting has been in the Royal Collection since 1811.
The Dictionary of Art Historians (DAH) is an online encyclopedia of topics relating to art historians, art critics and their dictionaries. The mission of the project is to provide free, reliable, English-language information on published art historians.