Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self Portrait. c.1657. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.In Vienna's
Albertina, the exhibition
The Age of Rembrandt (4 March-June 21) assembles 150 works by some 70 artists from the museum’s seventeenth-century Netherlandish holdings, including Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt van Rijn, Aert van der Neer, Aelbert Cuyp, and Adriaen van Ostade. Together with works culled from other Austrian and foreign collections, they present a nice cross-section of art in the Dutch Golden Age: land- sea- and cityscapes, portraits, genre paintings and still-lifes paint a picture of that key period in Dutch history, in which the newly-formed North Sea mini-state, at once old-fashioned and hyper-modern, experienced a period of unprecedented economic, cultural and scientific development.
Jan van Goyen, Marine Landscape with Fishermen. 1646-1650. Szépmuvészeti Múzeum, Budapest.
Rembrandt, in his technical and thematic versatility, functions as an outstanding crystallisation point for this exhibition. Next to this Low Countries household name there’s also a prominent place for the work of Jan van Goyen, the Leiden landscape painter whose visions of water and skies became archetypes of Dutchness. But rest assured: you don’t just get the quintessential flatness, low skies and watery loveliness, but also some rather exotic stuff, like Rembrandt’s endearing black chalk elephant.
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, An Elephant. 1637. Albertina, Vienna.
For the Albertina this could be the second big step into things Dutch after last year’s highly succesful Van Gogh autumn exhibition, which demonstrated the artistic unity between Vincent’s expressive draughtsmanship and his radically new use of colour.
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