Rembrandt and His Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection

In the summer of 2017, the National Museum of China hosted the largest assembly of Dutch Golden Age paintings ever presented in China. Around seventy works drawn from The Leiden Collection, the private New York-based collection of Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan, filled the museum galleries from June 17 through September 3. The collection takes its name from the birthplace of Rembrandt and comprises roughly 250 seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, making it one of the most significant private holdings of the period anywhere in the world.

The exhibition centered on eleven paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn, the largest group of works by the master then in private hands, accompanied by paintings by Jan Lievens, Frans Hals, and other leading figures of the Dutch Golden Age. Among them was A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals by Vermeer (c. 1670–72), one of only around thirty-five surviving works attributed to the artist, making its Chinese debut. The small canvas (roughly 25 by 20 centimetres) had passed through centuries of obscurity before an intensive scientific investigation led by Sotheby’s beginning in the 1990s confirmed its seventeenth-century origin and its technical consistency with the methods of Vermeer. It sold at Sotheby’s London in 2004 and later entered The Leiden Collection.

The exhibition was organized by Leiden Collection curator Lara Yeager-Crasselt in collaboration with the National Museum of China. It drew large crowds during its Beijing run and was followed by a second Chinese venue at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai, where an expanded presentation titled Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals in the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection ran from September 23, 2017 through February 25, 2018.