Going Dutch

Aristotle With a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt, 1653 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/span>

The Age of Rembrandt, the big fall show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is a bit of a strange fish. It's not just that it's drawn entirely from the Met's sumptuous collection of 17th century Dutch paintings. It's chiefly about the collection, how it grew, who the Museum's wealthy donors were, what they purchased and gave to the place since 1871. That was the year the Museum's vice president, William Blodgett, went to Paris and bought up the 174 paintings that became the Met's "founding purchase", an instant permanent collection, with a heavy emphasis on Dutch art right from the start. The show is actually organized not by artist but around the collectors who were Met benefactors, men with names like Morgan, Huntington and Vanderbilt. All of them bought heavily in the market for Dutch masters. They bought up the aristocratic art of the Catholic courts of Europe as well. But it was especially in the art of Holland, a Protestant commercial republic, that the merchant princes of New York liked to imagine they saw themselves and their own nation reflected.

They often bought well, so this is a show with a lengthy inventory of major canvases by big names — Rembrandt, Hals, Hobbema, Van Ruisdael and Vermeer. (The Met owns five of Vermeer's 35 surviving canvases.) But they also made their share of blunders, or at least of purchases that the taste of a later generation — that would mean our's — would not esteem as highly as they did. So the Met's show also has a heavy share of secondary paintings and lesser known names and of Rembrandt's demoted to "school of..." There are two entire galleries, separated some distance from the main part of the show, that consist of nothing but minor and de-attributed canvases.

So I doubt that The Age of Rembrandt has the potential to be the hit that the Met enjoyed nine years ago with a show of 15th century Dutch art that was also drawn entirely from its collection. You're never quite swept away. I found it fascinating all the same, if only for the reminder it offered that encyclopedic institutions emerge only through a process of very bumpy growth, and that the "canonical" collections they put on display grow out of a primodial ooze of less spectacular holdings.

If you want to read more there's a smart, thorough (and thoroughly mixed) New York Times review here by Holland Cotter.