“Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Highlights from the Detroit Institute of Arts [DIA]” will open at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts on February 1. Drawn entirely from the DIA’s collection, this exhibition presents works of the great Dutch masters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan Steen, along with related decorative arts. The exhibition will remain on view in the Frist Center’s Ingram Gallery through May 19.
Comprising 73 paintings and 16 decorative arts, the exhibition sets the work of the great Dutch masters within the larger social, religious and political context of the Dutch Golden Age. Together these works provide a stunning survey of the art produced in the Seventeenth Century in the newly independent and prosperous Dutch republic.
The exhibition will open with a gallery focusing on Rembrandt, the most innovative, versatile and influential Dutch artist of the Seventeenth Century. “Rembrandt did not specialize in any one kind of painting, which distinguishes him from his contemporaries,” explained Frist Center curator Trinita Kennedy. “His vast production of paintings ranges across virtually every thematic category: genre, history painting, landscape, portraiture and still life. He was highly inventive and his work has never lost its extraordinary appeal.”
The first gallery will also present works by Rembrandt’s teacher, the Amsterdam painter Pieter Lastman, and Rembrandt’s own students and followers. Rembrandt was famous in his own day and ran an important workshop. While his exact number of pupils is unknown, it may have been as many as 40 to 50. “Rembrandt’s students copied and collaborated on his paintings and it can be difficult to distinguish their work from his own,” Kennedy observed. “Since the early Nineteenth Century, each generation of art historians has sought to define what was painted by Rembrandt, his pupils, his workshop, his circle and his followers. In this exhibition, we get to see how scholars are presently interpreting Rembrandt’s body of work.”
After the opening gallery with works by Rembrandt and his circle, the rest of the paintings in the exhibition will be organized thematically, with galleries dedicated to Portraiture: Faces of the Dutch Golden Age (featuring works by Frans Hals); Biblical Histories: The Impact of Calvinism on Religious Art in the Dutch Republic (Leonaert Bramer); Dutch Peasant Scenes and the Perils of Debauchery (Jan Steen); Domestic Interiors: Inner Worlds of the Dutch Republic (Pieter de Hooch, Gerard Ter Borch); Still-Life Painting: The World in Objects (Willem Kalf; Rachel Ruysch); Dutch Architectural Painting: Cityscapes and Church Interiors (Emmanuel de Witte); Marine Painting and the Global Dutch Economy (Ludolf Backhuysen); and Dutch Landscapes: Local Scenery and Pride of Place (Jacob van Ruisdael).
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is at 919 Broadway. For information, 615-244-3340 or www.fristcenter.org .
