Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection

Drawn entirely from the Leiden Collection, this exhibition of seventy-six Dutch old masters was the largest presentation of privately held seventeenth-century Dutch painting ever organised in the United States, and the collection’s first showing on American soil after stops in Paris, Abu Dhabi, St Petersburg, Moscow, Shanghai, and Beijing. Assembled by Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan beginning in 2003, and named for Rembrandt’s birthplace, the collection is one of the foremost private groups of Dutch Golden Age art in the world. The show was curated by Elizabeth Nogrady of the Leiden Collection with Robert Evren and J. Rachel Gustafson of the Norton, advised by the Vermeer scholar Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

Rembrandt stands at its heart, represented by seventeen paintings spanning every period of his career, the largest group of Rembrandts in any private collection and more than all but a handful of the world’s great museums can claim. Around him hang the artists of his circle, his Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman and pupils Ferdinand Bol and Arent de Gelder, and from his native Leiden his friend and rival Jan Lievens and his student Gerrit Dou, together with Jan Steen, Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu, and painters from other Dutch centres such as Carel Fabritius, Frans Hals, and Gerard ter Borch.

At the centre of it all was the show’s sole Vermeer, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, painted around 1670 to 1675. One of Vermeer’s last and smallest works, it is also the only one of his roughly three dozen paintings in private hands, every other accepted Vermeer belonging to a public museum. Its presence gave visitors in Florida a rare chance to stand before an autograph Vermeer, a young woman in a yellow shawl with red ribbons in her hair, seated at the keyboard whose subject and setting Vermeer returned to again and again across his career.

Organised thematically rather than by artist, the display offered a glimpse of seventeenth-century life in the Netherlands, with portraits and character studies of the era’s citizens alongside scenes of everyday activity, market vendors, soldiers at cards, readers and letter-writers, and the occasional religious or mythological subject of the kind kept in private homes. The paintings hung in a regally dim, shadowy gallery, small ceiling spotlights setting the faces aglow so that the fine wrinkles, whiskers, and granular stitching of Dutch portraiture stood out against the broad, dark brushwork around them. The show drew crowds for timed, two-hour visits, including art-world visitors in nearby Miami for Art Basel, and ran through 29 March 2026.