The Abduction of Europa

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn soːn vɑn ˈrɛin], 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669 was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch Golden Age painting,... although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative. Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, and for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.
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The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum in California. It has two locations, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades. The museum at the Getty Center contains "Western art from the Middle Ages to the present;" its estimated 1.3 million visitors annually makes it one of the most visited museums in the United States. The museum at the Getty Villa contains art from "ancient... Greece, Rome, and Etruria". In 1974, J. Paul Getty opened his second museum, in a re-creation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, on his property in Pacific Palisades, California. In 1982, the museum became the richest in the world when it inherited US$1.2 bn. In 1997, the museum moved to its current location in Brentwood; the Pacific Palisades museum, renamed the "Getty Villa", was closed for renovation until 2006. Detailed information about the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collections is provided on GettyGuide, a suite of interactive multimedia tools available at the Museum, as well as on getty.edu.
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