Where Darkness Meets Light…Rembrandt and his Contemporaries

“Where Darkness Meets Light… Rembrandt and his Contemporaries: The Golden Age of Dutch Art” was organised by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and presented at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul from 21 February to 10 June 2012. The exhibition brought 110 works, comprising 73 paintings, 19 drawings, and 18 objects including carpets, ceramics, silverware, and glassware, by 59 artists to Turkey for the first time. The curators, Pieter Roelofs and Anne Lenders of the Rijksmuseum, arranged the selection to trace the breadth and variety of seventeenth-century Dutch art, from Rembrandt and his circle to genre painters, still-life specialists, and landscape masters.

The exhibition was mounted to mark the 400th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Turkey, a bond traced to the Ottoman–Dutch treaty of 1612. It was the first time the Rijksmuseum had organised a Dutch Golden Age exhibition in Turkey, and the show also stood as the institution’s final major touring export before the reopening of its renovated Amsterdam building in April 2013. Rembrandt was represented by five paintings, including his Portrait of Haesje van Cleyburgh (1634), Still Life with Peacocks (c. 1639), and Portrait of Dr Ephraïm Bueno (c. 1645–47). The exhibition’s catalogue was published by the Sakıp Sabancı Museum with texts by the two Rijksmuseum curators.

Vermeer’s The Love Letter (c. 1669–70, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) appeared as catalogue number 93 and was among the most intimate works in the selection. The painting shows a young woman pausing at a lute in her lap to receive a letter from her maidservant, the domestic scene framed by a partly open door that gives the viewer the sense of an unannounced glance into a private interior. Its presence in Istanbul brought one of the Rijksmuseum’s most quietly celebrated Vermeers before Turkish audiences for the first time.