The life and art of Sarah Belchetz-Swenson
Painter, portraitist, and printmaker, 1938-2021
Sarah painted this deliberately unfinished self-portrait for a workshop on Rembrandt’s materials and techniques. Using authentic pigments, she shows how Rembrandt used a limited range of colors to build up complex layers of light, shade, and form on a stretched canvas. Sarah and her colleague, the conservator Phoebe Dent Weil, studied and taught Rembrandt’s technique and published a paper on his burnt oil technique.