The Age of Rembrandt, Dutch Paintings and Drawings of the 17th Century

‘The Age of Rembrandt, Dutch Paintings and Drawings of the 17th Century’ was a landmark loan exhibition organized in cooperation with the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Netherlands Ministry for Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Social Welfare. It brought 125 works to Japan: 78 paintings, 44 drawings, and 3 prints drawn from Dutch public and private collections, offering Japanese audiences their most comprehensive encounter to date with the art of the Dutch Golden Age. The exhibition opened at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo on 19 October 1968 and ran through 22 December before travelling to the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, where it was on view from 12 January to 2 March 1969.

Among the paintings was Vermeer’s Diana and Her Companions(catalogue no. 69), lent by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The picture, dating from around 1653 to 1656, is Vermeer’s only surviving mythological composition and one of the earliest works securely attributed to him. It depicts the goddess Diana resting with four of her nymphs in a nocturnal landscape, a subject without precedent in Vermeer’s later output. The canvas had passed through more than two centuries of uncertain attribution before the Mauritshuis acquired it in 1876 and scholarly examination of the altered signature confirmed its authorship. Its inclusion in the 1968 to 1969 tour marked one of the first occasions the painting had travelled outside the Netherlands.

The exhibition was part of a broader postwar effort by the Dutch government and cultural institutions to extend the international reach of the Netherlands’ seventeenth-century artistic heritage. The Yomiuri Shimbun’s co-organisation reflected the newspaper group’s established role as a major facilitator of international art exhibitions in Japan during that era. The two-city tour introduced visitors to Rembrandt, Hals, Ruisdael, and their contemporaries, and helped lay the groundwork for the lasting interest in Dutch Golden Age painting that Japanese institutions would build upon in subsequent decades.