Vermeer and Rembrandt: The Masters of the 17th Century Dutch Golden Age

"Vermeer and Rembrandt: The Masters of the 17th Century Dutch Golden Age" was a travelling exhibition that brought approximately sixty paintings from major international collections to Japan across three venues. It opened at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in October 2015, transferred to the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills from 14 January to 31 March 2016, and concluded at the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art from 6 April to 8 May 2016. The Fukushima stop coincided with the museum's reopening after a year of renovations and carried additional significance as part of the cultural recovery programme following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

The show drew its loans primarily from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. All sixty works were oil paintings; no drawings or prints were included. Alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt, the exhibition represented a wide cross-section of the Dutch Golden Age, with works by Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Karel Fabritius, Pieter Claesz, and Willem Kalf. The works were arranged thematically by genre: genre scenes, portraiture, landscape, and still life, building a broad picture of seventeenth-century Dutch painting at its peak.

The centerpiece Vermeer loan was "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" (c. 1662), making its Japanese debut. The painting, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1889 as the first Vermeer to enter an American public collection, shows a woman in morning light opening a window while holding a silver pitcher and basin. Given that fewer than forty Vermeer paintings are known to exist, the work drew particular attention from Japanese audiences who had followed the decade-long Vermeer boom that had transformed the artist into a cultural phenomenon in the country. Rembrandt's "Bellona" (1633), also from the Metropolitan and also on its Japanese premiere, provided the exhibition's other anchor.