Van Loon Hendrik | Van Loon Joannis: Moj prijatelj Rembrandt

Joannis van Loon, Hendrik van Loon: My friend Rembrandt

»The public does not understand my intentions at all... they laugh mockingly and say: 'He is not an artist by trade, he does not take his art seriously and does not paint things as we see them.'
May God preserve me to see things through their eyes. They can and they will let me starve, but they will not rob me of my conviction that I am right and they are wrong. Anyone can paint things as they are. But to paint things as they exist only in assumption - that, dear doctor, is the task that makes life interesting... because it is not so much about what one sees, but how one sees. A good artist can feel a deeper urge by looking at a slaughtered ox in some ordinary butcher shop, than a bad artist by seeing a dozen churches in the very birthplace of Raphael.
I cannot paint differently than what I paint. I stick to my way of painting and I will stick to it until I go to the almshouse or lie down in the grave. Then you can put a tombstone on me with the inscription: 'Here rests a madman'.«
The mentioned Rembrandt quote is just a hint that gives an idea of ​​how many interesting thoughts of the painter and details from his life are in this book. Because it was written by his contemporary, Joannis van Loon, a doctor and friend with whom he spent the last thirty years of his life. This "first-hand" testimony was prepared for the press by the distinguished historian and writer Hendrik van Loon, the doctor's, as he states, "descendant in the ninth generation".
About Rembrandt himself, we can only say here that he lived in the land of windmills, a difficult and unenviable life, without money, recognition and understanding, fighting windmills in people's heads all his life. And today? The painting "Night Watch", for example, which was once rejected and the subject of ridicule, is now the subject of study and admiration, and is one of the greatest Dutch cultural and tourist values, and its author is generally recognized as one of the greatest, most influential, most distinctive, most important, most ingenious, most... painters in the history of art and in general one of the greatest people in the history of mankind. What else to add? Perhaps another opinion about Rembrandt from this excellent biography: "When he gave in to his dreams, he lost everything he had - and he also gained everything."