Rembrandt and His Works

A Dutch mill bears “Rembrandt” in gold above its door—but John Burnet says it is the wrong mill to claim as the painter’s birthplace. The real story begins with a boy sent to study law who would rather paint from nature.

Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Burnet follows Rembrandt from the neighbourhood of Leyden to Amsterdam, where the young artist found wealthy patrons—and a style no teacher could give him. The facts of his early life are hazy, but Burnet turns to what can be seen in the work: light and colour softened like twilight, drawn from nature and made unmistakably Rembrandt’s own. He traces the painter’s development while asking what made that originality possible. Can the principles behind Rembrandt’s most captivating effects be found in the world around us?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.