SOURCE: Cahn, Robert. Review of An Introduction to Rembrandt, by Kenneth Clark. Library Journal 103 (1 May 1978): 963-64.

In the following review, Cahn characterizes Clark's An Introduction to Rembrandt as “insightful” and “elegant.”

Shunning both biographical romanticism and purely formal and iconographical analysis, Lord Clark has authored a most insightful and humane Rembrandt primer. Pedantry and sentimentality are avoided in favor of an informed and maturely felt meditation on the works and their creator. The elegantly written essays [in An Introduction to Rembrandt] delve into the master's oeuvre and career from both thematic and evolutionary vantage points. Thus, while there are individual considerations of the complex and profoundly autobiographical self-portraits, Rembrandt's rebellious anti-classical realism and the idiosyncratically selected biblical subjects, there are also chapters on the earlier baroque and later classical phases of the artist's development. I can imagine no better introduction to the art of Rembrandt.