Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632-1675 Delft). Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662. Oil on canvas, 18 x 16 in. (45.7 x 40.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889
In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met The exhibition ‘In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met’ brings together some of the Metropolitan Museum’s greatest paintings to present the remarkable 17th-century Dutch Painting in a new light. October 16, 2018 – October 1, 2020.]]>
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through roughly 65 works organized thematically, the exhibition orients visitors to key issues in 17th-century Dutch culture—from debates about religion and conspicuous consumption to painters’ fascination with the domestic lives of women.
The exhibition provides a fresh perspective on the canon and parameters of the Dutch Golden Age by uniting paintings from The Met’s Benjamin Altman, Robert Lehman, and Jack and Belle Linsky bequests. Works typically displayed separately in the Museum’s galleries —such as Rembrandt’s “Gerard de Lairesse” and Lairesse’s own “Apollo and Aurora”— are presented side by side, producing a visually compelling narrative about the tensions between realism and idealism during this period.
The presentation offers an opportunity to display recently conserved and rarely exhibited works, including Margareta Haverman’s “A Vase of Flowers”—one of only two known paintings by the artist and the only painting by an early modern Dutch woman in the Museum’s collection. The exceptional quality of Rembrandt’s late self-portrait will be even more evident following the removal of a synthetic varnish dating to the mid-20th century.
The title of the exhibition comes from one of the period’s major works of art theory, Philips Angel’s “The Praise of Painting” (1642), a pioneering defense of realism in art.
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‘Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age’ in Washington (exhibition, 2018)
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