The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The Age of Rembrandt” was an unusual kind of exhibition: rather than borrowing works from other institutions, the Metropolitan Museum put its entire Dutch paintings collection on view simultaneously for the first time. All 228 paintings in the department, spanning the seventeenth century from Rembrandt and Vermeer to the specialist painters of landscape, still life, and domestic genre, were installed across newly renovated galleries and opened to the public on 18 September 2007. The occasion was the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt van Rijn’s birth, but the framing was deliberately broad, presenting Rembrandt not as a solitary genius but as the presiding figure of a remarkably fertile period in Dutch artistic life.

The exhibition was organised by Walter Liedtke, who had served as the Met’s Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings since 1980 and devoted much of his career to the collection on display. It coincided with the publication of his two-volume catalogue Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Yale University Press, 2007), a scholarly survey of all 229 Dutch pictures in the collection running to more than 1,000 pages. The catalogue received the Association of Art Museum Curators’ award for the best catalogue of a permanent collection. A shorter version appeared simultaneously as the summer 2007 issue ofThe Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.

The Met’s four Vermeers were among the highlights of the display. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c. 1662), A Maid Asleep(c. 1656–57), Woman with a Lute (c. 1662–63), and the large allegorical canvas Allegory of Faith (c. 1670–74) were each discussed at length in Liedtke’s catalogue, which addressed questions of dating, attribution, and the paintings’ relationship to Vermeer’s contemporaries. Seen together as part of a coherent departmental survey, the four works illustrated both Vermeer’s consistency of method and the range of subjects he was willing to explore, from intimate domestic interiors to complex theological allegory.