Benjamin Moser: belief

Transcript context

…How was Rembrandt so productive? Well, he got to be quite old, first of all, by the standards of the Dutch. He was 63 when he died. As you know, in the book, a lot of these people die in their 20s, 30s. Vermeer dies at 43. So, Rembrandt gets a whole extra generation of work. He also, though, was just one of these obsessive creators, a kind of volcano. It’s completely dismaying. I came to this country when I was a kid, and I would see the early Rembrandts in the museums here, and I’d realize he was younger than I was. He’s already painting these incredible masterpieces, and I was sitting here trying to write some article that wouldn’t get turned down by some terrible magazine that I didn’t even want to write for. He was painting these canvases, like The Anatomy Lesson in The Hague, these incredibly famous paintings. I think he does, as I say somewhere in the book — we fill it in a little bit, but he basically died in front of his easel. He was an obsessive, driven creator. That’s why he died in front of the easel. He also died very poor and mostly forgotten. Do you think Rembrandt prints are still underpriced? As you may know, there was a London auction of quite a few of them a few months ago, and many went for 2x or 3x the estimates. Why aren’t Rembrandt prints just totally unaffordable? They’re very good, many of them. People don’t seem to care anymore —…

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