Painters rarely left the pages of a book blank. In several pictures on this list the words can still be read, and they change what the scene means: a hymn altered until it no longer fits its own music, a father's Bible answered by his son's novel.
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How These Were Chosen
A book solves practical problems for a painter. It gives a figure something to do with the hands and a reason to lower the eyes, and its pale pages put a patch of light wherever the picture needs one.
A book also says who owns it. Copied by hand, it long cost a great deal. Put back in date order, the books here move from Bibles, prophecies and hymns to philosophy, criticism and novels.
The rule for this list is simple. Someone in the picture is reading or writing, or has just stopped, or the words are painted clearly enough to be read. A closed book set at an elbow as a badge of learning did not count.
12. Rembrandt, Titus at His Desk (1655)
The front of a wooden lectern fills the lower half of this canvas, and the boy behind it sits so low that only his head and hands clear its top edge. He has a pen in one hand, an inkwell and a pen case in the other, and his eyes have drifted away from his papers.
The boy, about fourteen, is usually identified as Titus, the son of Rembrandt. He was born in 1641 in the family house on the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam, where this picture was painted in 1655. Of the four children Rembrandt had with his first wife, Saskia, Titus was the only one to survive.
The Dutch title explains the board that takes up so much room. It calls the desk a lezenaar, a lectern, a piece of furniture built to hold a book open at an angle so that a reader can study with free hands. Yet no book sits on this one. Under Titus's hands lie loose sheets of his own writing, and although he holds every tool he needs to add to them, he is not writing either.
That empty lectern is where Rembrandt spent his effort. He set its front flat against the picture surface, so that the board stands between the boy and anyone looking at him. Then he gave the grain of the board his coarsest, almost expressionist strokes. The most heavily worked surface in the painting is a stand for a book that is not there, and above it a student sits lost in his own thoughts.
At a Glance
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669)
Painted: 1655, Amsterdam
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 77 × 63 cm (30.3 × 24.8 in)
Where to see it: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
About This Painting
What happened to Rembrandt's son Titus?
He married Magdalena van Loo in February 1668 and died of the plague that September. His daughter, Titia, was born six months after his death.
11. Winslow Homer, The New Novel (1877)
A young woman lies stretched out on the grass, lost in a book, in a watercolor Winslow Homer painted in 1877. He gave her no name. He gave one to the book instead, and at the time the kind of book he named still had preachers warning young readers against it.