Anthony Bailey
Responses to Rembrandt.
Timken Publishers, 1994. 0943221188 xiv/140 pages.
Hardcover volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in black cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Former library book has stamp at top edge of text block and traces of removed attachments to endpapers. Name of libray is also discreetly stamped at bottom of copyright page. Pages are clean and bright. Illustrated with plates with 24 b&w reproductions. Dust jacket is in fine condition.
Dust jacket bears the subtitle "Who Painted "The Polish Rider"?  Controversy Reconsidered". A Controversy erupted when the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), a team of Dutch art scholars, suggested in 1984 that "The Polish Rider", which hangs in Manhattan's Frick Museum, was not painted by Rembrandt, but rather by his pupil, Willem Drost. In this elegantly written inquiry, part of which ran in the New Yorker , novelist and essayist Bailey contends that even though RRP uses scientific methods such as chemical analysis of pigments and X-ray photography, the group sometimes makes wrongheaded attributions by ignoring subjective and historical data. Bailey, who is very skeptical of RRP's attribution of the picture to Drost, concedes that only 12 paintings in existence can be proved indisputably to be Rembrandt's by way of documents and unbroken provenance. Illustrated with oils and etchings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries, Bailey's investigation is an eye-opening look at the highly subjective world of connoisseurship.