The reason I love the DK Art Book series is the way they are formatted. Each page is marked with a colored bar (yellow, blue, or pink) which indicates which topic the page is discussing. Yellow is Life and Works, which gives general information about the title artist; blue are Background pages, which give historical and cultural background information about the time period the artist lived in; and pink pages are for Masterpieces, which show a specific work by the artist and analyzes it, hi-lighting certain aspects of the work and offering interesting details about it.

The Rembrandt edition offers less insight on the artist's style and focuses more on his life story; his rapid ascension into the upper tiers of fame and wealth and his equally swift decline into debt and scandal. Several of the Masterpiece pages don't even analyze the artwork, but rather offer a large picture of the painting surrounded by other similar or related pieces of art. Still, despite this, I still felt like I learned a lot about Rembrandt simply by gazing at his work, and who couldn't love a guy who liked to include lots of huge books in his art? ( )