Google doodles some fine art to celebrate Rembrandt's birthday

Who said that Google Doodles can’t be fine art?

In a bid to commemorate the 407th birthday of the great artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the Google doodle today is a portrait of the painter with the word ‘Google’etched out behind him. No cute, gimmicky or animated doodles for the search engine today!

The portrait, which is in classic shades of browns and blacks is a lovely image in the style of Rembrandt’s own self portraits, of which there are many.

According to Wikipedia , “At one time about ninety paintings were counted as Rembrandt self-portraits, but it is now known that he had his students copy his own self-portraits as part of their training. Modern scholarship has reduced the autograph count to over forty paintings, as well as a few drawings and thirty-one etchings, which include many of the most remarkable images of the group. Some show him posing in quasi-historical fancy dress, or pulling faces at himself.”

The Google doodle is rather more sombre however. In it, the artist gazes placidly ahead with an almost bemused expression on his face. One could only imagine what he would have made of the Internet and this tribute to his work!

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A little bit of trivia about Rembrandt:

* He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age.

* In 1624 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where he was apprenticed to the fashionable Pieter Lastman, but he only remained there for a year and then returned to Leiden. Several of Rembrandt’s earliest pictures owe a clear debt to Lastman, such as the Stoning of Stephen.

* Earlier 20th century connoisseurs claimed Rembrandt had produced over 600 paintings, nearly 400 etchings and 2,000 drawings. More recent scholarship, from the 1960s to the present day (led by the Rembrandt Research Project), often controversially, has winnowed his oeuvre to nearer 300 paintings.

* His prints, traditionally all called etchings, although many are produced in whole or part by engraving and sometimes drypoint, have a much more stable total of slightly under 300.

* Rembrandt’s most important painting was the Night Watch through which he sought to find solutions to compositional and narrative problems that had been attempted in previous works.

Read more about him here and here .