Rembrandt, Vermeer & the Dutch Golden Age Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first 2019 international exhibition, Rembrandt, Vermeer & the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre, will bring together paintings and drawings by Dutch masters Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and their contemporaries. Opening on February 14, 2019, the exhibition will survey Rembrandt’s artistic journey in Leiden and Amsterdam and his relationships with rivals and peers, including Johannes Vermeer, Jan Lievens, Ferdinand Bol, Carel Fabritius, Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris and Frans Hals.

During the Golden Age, the Dutch Republic established itself as a world leader in trade, science, and the arts. Set against this backdrop of cultural exchange, exploration and discovery, the show will explore the artistic traditions that flourished in Leiden and the wider Netherlands in this period, including the development of a new school of artists, called the fijnschilders (fine painters), best known for their exquisitely rendered scenes of daily life.

The exhibition will feature 22 paintings and drawings from across Rembrandt’s career and his workshop—from his early famed series of allegorical paintings of the senses, which demonstrate the artist’s youthful ingenuity and experimentation with expressions, composition and colour during his Leiden days, to later works created in Amsterdam, including sensitively-rendered portraits, a renowned self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes and Minerva in Her Study (both from The Leiden Collection), his monumental history painting of the goddess Minerva. These works are displayed alongside paintings by other masters from Rembrandt’s artistic circle, demonstrating the influence that this remarkable group of artists had on each other’s work.

On this extraordinary occasion, Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (The Leiden Collection) and The Lacemaker (Musée du Louvre), two paintings on canvas cut from the same bolt, will hang beside one another for the first time in 300 years at Louvre Abu Dhabi. Also, Louvre Abu Dhabi will display for the first time its latest acquisition, Rembrandt’s oil sketch Head of a young man, with clasped hands: Study of the figure of Christ, ca. 1648-56. 

95 artworks, including paintings, drawings and objects, primarily drawn from The Leiden Collection, one of the largest and most significant private collections of artworks from the Dutch Golden Age, highlighted with the Musée du Louvre exceptional collections. Loans from the Rijksmuseum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will complete the presentation. On view until May 18, 2019, the exhibition is curated by Blaise Ducos, Chief Curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Musée du Louvre, and Lara Yeager-Crasselt, Curator of The Leiden Collection and a specialist in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art.

The exhibition will unfold throughout six sections:

1. At the Heart of the Dutch Golden Age;
2. Extraordinary Beginnings: Rembrandt van Rijn in Leiden;
3. The Center of the Golden Age: Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam (this section includes a special cabinet of prints and drawings)
4. Fine Painting in Leiden: Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris, and their Contemporaries
5. Picturing Everyday life in the Dutch Republic
6. Historical Lessons and Tales of Morality