CUMBERLAND, Md. – Johnstown native and author Russell Shorto shared insights on his next project – a book on the life of 17th-century painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn – Wednesday at Arcadian Gallery.
Through facts gleaned from his research and slides shown on a television screen, Shorto took the audience at the Cumberland, Maryland, gallery through Rembrandt’s works, influences and artistic style.
“It’s kind of funny to talk about a book you haven’t written yet,” Shorto said.
“I’m a big fan of Renaissance art, classical art, and I want to offer that to the community,” gallery owner Chris Sloan said.
Rembrandt lived from 1606 to 1669. Shorto detailed the artist’s complex life, with hundreds of paintings and drawings produced amid legal battles and eventually financial struggles.
The future novel has the working title “The Dark and the Light” – which describes both Rembrandt’s painting style and his descent into bankruptcy even as one of Amsterdam’s most popular and influential artists.
“He died broke,” Shorto told the gathering. “… I want to understand – how is it possible that he falls that far?”
Among the images Shorto shared was one of Rembrandt’s well-known painting “The Night Watch” – measuring 12 feet by 14 1/2 feet in size – commissioned in 1639 and completed in 1642.
Rembrandt, Shorto said, “was fascinated with theater,” and many of his paintings, including “The Night Watch,” appear to be moments of “actors on a stage.”
Shorto revealed that the painter only used seven pigments in his works – including a red produced by grinding up beetles from South America – when 22 were available at the time, thanks to the global reach of the Dutch trading empire.
“What I’m trying to write is not really a biography of Rembrandt, but it is in that arena,” Shorto said.
The project takes the writer back to Amsterdam and connects with previous works on Dutch history, as well as the founding of New York – “The Island at the Center of the World” (2004) and “Taking Manhattan” (2025) – plus “Descartes’ Bones” (2008).
Tracy Smith, of Cumberland, won a signed copy of “Taking Manhattan” during a raffle Wednesday, getting Shorto’s seventh book with her No. 7 ticket – prompting her to say she should run out and play 7 in the lottery.
“I really wanted to read this book,” Smith said.
