From Rembrandt to Vermeer

To mark Amsterdam's 750th anniversary, the H'ART Museum (formerly Hermitage Amsterdam) hosted the largest public showing of The Leiden Collection ever mounted in the Netherlands. From Rembrandt to Vermeer ran from 9 April to 24 August 2025 and brought together seventy-five works by twenty-seven artists from the private collection assembled by Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan. Curated by Elizabeth Nogrady of The Leiden Collection and Birgit Boelens of the H'ART Museum, with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. as adviser, the exhibition offered what the museum described as an intimate glimpse into the seventeenth-century Netherlands through its great masters.

Rembrandt stood at the centre. For the first time, eighteen of his works, seventeen paintings and one drawing, were shown together in Amsterdam. Around them hung artists of his circle and his rivals: Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, Frans van Mieris, Jan Lievens, Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, and painters from other Dutch cities such as Gerard ter Borch, Caspar Netscher, and Hendrick ter Brugghen. Rather than proceeding artist by artist, the display was organised thematically, with people at its heart. Portraits and character studies sat alongside scenes of food and drink, reading and music, children and old age, and the religious and mythological subjects kept in private homes.

The H'ART Museum singled out one loan above the rest: A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, the only painting by Johannes Vermeer in private hands. The museum noted that the panel was conserved especially for the occasion, giving Amsterdam visitors a rare chance to see an autograph Vermeer outside the museum world. Painted around 1670 to 1675, the small canvas shows a young woman in a yellow shawl turning from her virginal to meet the viewer's gaze, one of Vermeer's last works and the solitary Vermeer in a collection otherwise dominated by Rembrandt and the Leiden school.

Women featured throughout the hang, from wealthy matrons and goddesses to ordinary citizens going about daily life. The museum drew particular attention to a painting by Maria Schalcken, one of the few women known to have worked professionally as a painter in the period. The Leiden Collection itself, founded in 2003 and focused on portraits, history paintings, and genre scenes, has functioned as what its founders call a lending library for Old Master paintings, with works sent to more than ninety museums worldwide. A bilingual catalogue, Art and Life in Rembrandt's Time, accompanied the show, and the museum offered a combination ticket with the Rembrandt House Museum.