During the 17th century, Amsterdam became one of the leading economic centres in Europe. The city and its population grew rapidly, trade and art flourished. The influential bourgeoisie shaped the fortunes of the city and confidently celebrated itself in magnificent group portraits by the city’s leading artists, first and foremost Rembrandt.

More than any other artist, the painter Rembrandt developed a charisma through the outstanding quality and originality of his works and through the organisation of his workshop. His pupils and successors continued his style as the Rembrandt “brand” with an appeal which has remained unbroken to this day. We ask: Why did Rembrandt’s art affect contemporary painters as well as continuing to attract generations of collectors and present-day viewers?

The Romantic Era was a particularly splendid epoch in miniature portraiture. A host of artists created portraits of great sensitivity and remarkable technical perfection. 142 masterpieces from the famous Tansey Collection illustrate the golden age of an art which was forced to give way to photography during the 19th century.

Founded in 1948, Hirmer Publishers soon established a name for art books produced to the highest standards. Over the past decade they have become equally well-known in English-speaking countries, with a reputation as one of the most prestigious publishers in this field. This survey of English titles from 2010 to 2020 encompasses a wealth of subjects across the centuries, from antiquity to the modern age.  

The Great Landscape with a Tempest in Vienna is one of Peter Paul Rubens’s largest and most dramatic landscapes. Starting from the far-reaching discoveries during the latest restoration, the volume provides a comprehensive insight into the process of creation of this fascinating picture as well as its art-historical interpretation.

The 300th birthday of Empress Maria Theresia provides an opportunity to examine her outstanding interest in the fine arts. At the invitation of the reforming monarch a large number of painters, sculptors and other artists in Austria and abroad found a wealth of work opportunities. Correspondingly, this era has left its mark on the countries of the former Habsburg monarchy to this day.

With their overwhelming wealth of forms, prints of designs of historic ornaments are a source of boundless inspiration for graphic artists and designers. They also allow collectors and art historians to reliably date works and classify styles. This cornucopia of design, published here for the first time in English, contains the finest images from the famous, hitherto out-of-print, and seminal work by Rudolf Berliner.

The outstanding painting A Girl Reading by Camille Corot (1796–1875) is placed in the context of a selection of Corot’s paintings and drawings providing a key to his creative output in the genre of figure painting.