Do mistakes always matter? Jakob Rosenberg’s Rembrandt Life and Work

• Main Author: Catherine B. Scallen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2017-06-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: Jakob Rosenberg; Rembrandt; connoisseurship; mistakes; provenance research
• Online Access: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/scallen.pdf

Two generations of readers in the United States, art historians, students, and the general public, gained appreciation of Rembrandt’s art and knowledge of his life from Jakob Rosenberg’s monograph Rembrandt. Life and Work. First published in 1948, and appearing in subsequent editions in the 1960s and 1980s, it can still arouse admiration in the reader for Rosenberg’s sensitive understanding of Rembrandt as an artist and man. Yet Rosenberg’s conception of the artist as presented in this monograph is based on many works, particularly paintings, that are no longer considered the work of Rembrandt—and in some cases, not even viewed as workshop production. The question is: do these attribution errors matter? In this article, I explore the question of whether individual connoisseurship decisions—and the cumulative weight of many mistakes—invalidate a larger conceptual presentation of Rembrandt.