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The Leiden Collection and Long Museum (West Bund) announce the exhibition of masterpieces from the celebrated Leiden Collection, the largest and most important collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age in private hands. The exhibition will open on September 23, 2017 and continue through February 25, 2018. It will feature 78 works, making it the largest showing of seventeenth-century Dutch art ever presented in China. The selections will comprise 12 works by Rembrandt van Rijn, one painting by Johannes Vermeer, and two portrait paintings by Frans Hals, as well as masterpieces by other artists from the period.

The great masters Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals defined the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, making an extraordinary impact on the history of art. Rembrandt, the master of shadow and light, achieved a depth of human feeling in his paintings that has never been surpassed. Iconic works on view in the exhibition will include: Minerva in Her Study (part of a series represented at The State

Hermitage Museum, Museo Nacional Del Prado, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art), the much-storied Young Girl with a Gold-Trimmed Cloak, and the recently discovered Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell), the earliest of the artist’s signed works.

Vermeer’s extremely rare and highly treasured paintings depict the everyday life and activities of Dutch people in the seventeenth century, evoking a certain tenderness and tranquility. The exhibition will include Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, which is the only mature painting in private hands of the thirty-four known works by the artist. It is produced on the same bolt of cloth as the great artist’s The Lacemaker, which belongs to the Louvre’s permanent collection.

Frans Hals is best known for his distinctive portraits, which illustrate strata of society – from workers to pastors and government officials – and are renowned for the lively expressions on the sitters’ faces. At the Long Museum, two portraits of clergymen will be on view.

Other highlights of the exhibition include four works that have never before been exhibited in China. These are Rembrandt’s drawing Young Lion Resting, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Head of a Bear, and the paintings Emperor Commodus as Hercules and as a Gladiator and Julius Caesar by Peter Paul Rubens, the highly influential master of Baroque art.

The exhibition also features four paintings by Rembrandt’s studiomate in Leiden and friendly rival, Jan Lievens; a painting by Rembrandt’s pupil Carel Fabritius, Hagar and the Angel, which is one of only thirteen surviving works by the creator of The Goldfinch; nine paintings by Rembrandt’s first and most influential student Gerrit Dou; and six works by Jan Steen, one of the most accomplished genre painters of his era. 

Catalogue

A fully illustrated, Chinese-English bilingual catalogue accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue contains a Foreword by Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, a Preface by Ms. Wang Wei, founder of the Long Museum, and two essays by Curator Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt focusing on The Leiden Collection in the Dutch Golden Age, as well as China and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. The catalogue also includes 78 color illustrations.

About The Leiden Collection

The Leiden Collection, founded in 2003 by American collectors Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, comprises some 250 paintings and drawings and represents one of the largest and most important assemblages of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings in private hands.

The Collection is named after Rembrandt’s native city in honor of the master’s greatness and focuses on the works of Rembrandt and his followers, illuminating the personalities and themes that shaped the Golden Age over five generations. The Collection is the most comprehensive representation of the Leiden artists known as fijnschilders (“fine manner painters”), who concentrated on painting portraits, tronies (character studies), genre scenes, and history paintings.

About the Curator

Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt is the Curator of The Leiden Collection. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Maryland with a specialty in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art.

Dr. Yeager-Crasselt has held positions at the Clark Art Institute, the National Gallery of Art, and KU Leuven, Belgium, and has taught at the Catholic University of America and the George Washington University. She is the author of the book Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome and Brussels (Brepols Publishers, 2015), and served as co-editor of Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes from the Prado, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Clark Art Institute (Yale University Press, 2016).