ARENT DE GELDER (Dordrecht 1645-1727)
€90.00
aetas aurea v
J.W. von Moltke
Edited by Kristin Belkin. With chapters by Alan Chong and Christian Tümpel. Documents by Gabriël Pastoor.1994. 4to. 286 pp. text. Introduction and catalogue raisonné with 342 plts. and ills. from which 42 in color. Cloth bound with dustjacket
ISBN 90 70288 15 X
Arent de Gelder (1645-1727) was Rembrandt's last pupil. He was born in 1645 in the attractive provincial town of Dordrecht where N. Maes, S. van Hoogstraten, A. Cuyp and many other important Dutch painters of the 17th century had their home. However Arent de Gelder belongs to an entirely different generation. He started his career as a painter when the "Golden Age" of Dutch Art had come to its end. In the early sixties, as a young man he went to Amsterdam - the only occasion on which he seems to have left his native town for any length of time; then he had been accepted by Rembrandt to work in his studio, just about the period when he had entered his last heroic phase in painting.Arent de Gelder seems to have carried on the tradition of Rembrandt's approach to color far into the beginning of the 18th century. A careful analysis of Arent de Gelder's paintings will reveal that in truth he had a different understanding of the function of color within the conception visualized by him. Arent de Gelder's natural talent to use color in all its splendor is a constant source of joy when studying his work even if he is carried away by it to such a degree that at times he is neglecting the precision of basic design.
Arent de Gelder, in a way an outsider within Dutch Painting of the Post-Rembrandt period, was completely unconcerned about the artistic aims and intentions of his contemporaries and he went his own way.
