In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s main European Paintings galleries closed for a major skylights renovation in 2018, the museum moved a selection of Dutch Golden Age masterpieces into the lower-level galleries of the Robert Lehman Wing and used the occasion to rethink how that collection should be presented. The result, organised by Assistant Curator Adam Eaker, was “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” which opened on 16 October 2018 with 66 works drawn exclusively from the permanent collection. The title comes from Philips Angel’s 1642 treatise “Lof der schilder-konst” (“The Praise of Painting”), a pioneering defence of the Dutch painters’ ability to imitate nature and achieve powerful realistic effects. Rather than displaying works in the traditional chronological or artist-by-artist arrangement, Eaker organised them across nine thematic galleries whose subjects ranged from portraiture and landscape to still life, comic painting, and the depiction of women’s domestic lives.

The exhibition united works scattered across the museum’s Benjamin Altman bequest, the Robert Lehman Collection, and the Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, bringing paintings typically displayed in separate wings into direct conversation for the first time. Rembrandt’s “Gerard de Lairesse” hung beside Lairesse’s own “Apollo and Aurora,” illuminating the tensions between realism and idealism that animated the period. The show also gave prominence to rarely exhibited pictures, including Margareta Haverman’s “A Vase of Flowers” (1716), the sole painting by an early modern Dutch woman then in the Met’s collection, conserved especially for the occasion. All four of the Met’s own Vermeers on site were included: “A Maid Asleep” and “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” appeared in the gallery devoted to women’s domestic lives, while “Study of a Young Woman” and “Allegory of Faith” contributed to the sections on portraiture and religious imagery respectively. The fifth Met Vermeer, “Young Woman with a Lute,” was on loan to Japan at the time and was not part of the show.

The exhibition offered a striking demonstration of the breadth of Vermeer’s output within a single institution, from the intimate observation of a solitary face in “Study of a Young Woman” to the elaborate Catholic iconography of “Allegory of Faith,” placing each canvas in conversation with genre painting by contemporaries including Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch. Their work appeared in the final gallery, “Behind Closed Doors,” which set the stage for Vermeer’s refinement of the high-life interior. The exhibition remained on view in the Lehman Wing galleries until the renovated main galleries reopened in December 2020.