The BBC News story "Abbey painting 'is Rembrandt self portrait' " reports that, based on more recent physical and circumstantial evidence, leading experts on the Dutch painter Rembrandt are again changing their minds and attributing a portrait of the himself to the artist, thereby making "this portrait ... one of [the] most important works of art ... in the National Trust's collection" ("Abbey Painting", 2013, 'Most Important Works' sect.).
As we notice in the very first sentence of the BBC's report, the modal verb may plays a crucial role. The experts have very strong evidence to support their attribution of the painting to Rembrandt, but that evidence is not so strong as to support the claim that it is a Rembrandt. So, do we now know it's a Rembrandt? Last month, the experts thought that they knew it was by a pupil of the master, but now they don't know that. And as that crucially important may tells us, they are less than certain about the new opinion that has made Britain's National Gallery so very happy, and greatly increased the value of the painting. So, do we, do they, now know that it is in fact a Rembrandt? I think that we do know this, but that we might be wrong. And the experts are sensibly having even more sophisticated tests done to help decrease the doubt, but I don't think it's possible to remove it: we can probably (hedging, hedging) never be certain as to who painted this great work of art.
But I am sure it's a great painting, however uncertain we might be as to it's actual creator. I used to spend hours poring over and copying Rembrandt self-portraits when I was trying to learn to draw and paint. Unfortunately, drawing and painting, like most skills, reading and writing for example, require lots of regular practice to develop, and this set of skills lost out to other demands on my time, so that my artistic ability is about on a par with my handwriting. Perhaps one day I'll work on those again, but not today. However, the effort I made for a couple of years did help me to see and appreciate paintings and drawings much better than I previously had. It's a bit like my flute playing - I was never going to make a concert flautist, but the hours of practise in my much younger days did a lot to enable me to better enjoy music, although these days I rarely listen to any, preferring to spend my time reading: I've loved a good argument ever since primary school.
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References
Gu Mai Bok (2013, March 19). Not only in the movie world, but also be true in the real world. Class Blog - AEP at AUA. Retrieved March 20, 2013 from http://peteraep.blogspot.com/2013/03/not-only-in-movie-world-but-also-true.html
I was able to use italics for three different reasons (and resisted the temptation to find a Dutch word to throw in), and quotation marks for three different reasons - perhaps I should have added a definition of know.
ReplyDeleteAnd in order fit the quotation in the summary into the grammar of my sentence, I needed to use the ellipses ( ... ) and [brackets] that we also see the writer using in "The Anthropological View of Religion" in Quest (Hartmann & Blass, 2007, pp. 23 - 25).
DeleteReference
Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.