BUDAPEST.- The large-scale exhibition titled Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, running in the Museum of Fine Arts from 31st October, showcases 17th-century Dutch art, one of the golden ages of European culture. Displaying 178 works by over 100 painters, the exhibition is built around one of the greatest masters of the period, Rembrandt, and twenty of his masterpieces. The most outstanding pieces of the Museum of Fine Arts’ rich Dutch collection is complemented by more than 130 paintings from some fifty European and American public and private collections. The most prominent loaning institutions include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Louvre, the London National Gallery, the Los Angeles Getty Museum, the New York Metropolitan, the Uffizi in Florence and Madrid’s Prado. Besides a significant number of works by Rembrandt – including the artist’s earliest known painting and one of his last self-portraits – visitors can view three works by Vermeer.

The Hungarian public has never before had the opportunity to see such a comprehensive exhibition of Dutch art from the 1600s. Filling a long-standing gap in the history of domestic exhibitions, Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age is the last large-scale exhibition before the Museum of Fine Arts closes for renovation work in spring 2015.

With its exhibition displaying the Dutch Golden Age the Museum of Fine Arts continues its series, launched in 2006, linked to its important collections. After El Greco, Velázquez, Goya in 2006; Botticelli to Titian in 2009 and Caravaggio to Canaletto in 2013, the current exhibition focuses on the 17th-century material of the museum’s Dutch Collection, which ranks high by international comparison: with its 500 paintings, including pieces by 17th-century masters, it is among the top five collections in Europe, excluding the Netherlands.

Rembrandt is one of the greatest artists of all time and his oeuvre is a faithful impression of the formation of Holland and the social changes interconnected with it. The exhibition, therefore, focuses on the Dutch master, as well as his followers and students, while also presenting the history of Dutch painting immediately prior to Rembrandt as well as around his time. The exhibited paintings also provide visitors with an insight into 17th-century Holland’s struggle for independence, the flourishing of the sciences, the fundamental religious and social changes, and the developments in people’s way of life and thinking.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections

Visitors first are presented with the historical background, beginning with pictures immortalising sea battles by artists Hendrick Vroom and Willem van de Velde the Elder, since the struggle for independence and the United Provinces becoming a world power was decided at sea. Two prominent events leading to Holland’s formation – the signing of the Twelve Year Truce in 1609 and the peace of Munster in 1648 – are each illustrated by a painting, but an allegory of the success of colonisation are also displayed.

The second part is devoted to portrait painting with likenesses of confident, rich burghers in group portraits, as well as representative or intimate pictures of married couples and families. Quickly gained wealth, the emergence of a new social layer of patricians, as well as an increasingly influential and expanding middle class served as the basis for an unprecedented burgeoning in portrait painting in Holland, resulting in works of often outstanding quality.

The third theme of the exhibition is abundance, treated in a diverse range of pictures depicting the pleasures of life. The rapidly earned prosperity had a major influence on Dutch people’s way of life and thinking, and their accrued wealth is illustrated in opulent luxury still-lifes by Pieter Claesz, Willem Heda, Abraham van Beijeren and Willem Kalf. The companies of people feasting and playing music in richly furnished houses and on elegant terraces in the pictures of Willem Buytewech, Dirck Hals and Jan Steen, and the young people drinking and lighting pipes in Hendrick ter Brugghen, Judit Leyster and Jan Milenaer’s works all exude the enjoyment of life, as do the genre paintings by Isaac and Adriaen van Ostade and Corneli Bega immortalising the merriments of peasants. This part of the exhibition also includes pictures reminding us of the transience of earthly joys and warning of the dangers of wastefulness.

The fourth section deals with the influence exerted by religious pluralism on painting. The struggle for independence was pursued in the spirit of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church was regarded as a symbol of an oppressive power. Reformed churches were stripped of statues and pictures, so works with religious themes hung on the walls of private homes instead. As Catholics were allowed to practise their religion, altarpieces were also made, the monumental style of which influenced pieces intended for domestic worship. In Haarlem Pieter de Grebber and Salomon de Bray followed the classical tradition, and the young Jan Lievens also set out along this path. In Utrecht Italian Caravaggism played an inspirational role, while in Amsterdam the Mennonites, Lambert Jacobsz. and Jacob Backer, represent the monumental style of religious painting in the 1630s. The humanisation of biblical themes was realised in Rembrandt’s art, and became widely influential.

The fifth section deals with Rembrandt and his influence upon his contemporaries. Works by the giant of Dutch painting are displayed in this chapter, including his earliest known painting as well as one of his last self-portraits. His earliest painting, the Spectacles Seller, executed in 1623, arrived at the exhibition from Rembrandt’s hometown, Leiden (Museum de Lakenhal), while his Self-portrait, presumably painted in the year of his death, in 1669, is on loan from the Uffizi in Florence. The exhibition also displays self-portraits from Munich (Alte Pinakothek), Paris (Musée du Petit Palais), and London (National Gallery), while a New York private collection loaned the splendid painting of Minerva, which, interestingly, was once the property of the famous Hungarian art collector, Marcell Nemes.

The next, sixth part, portrays town life, a theme of great importance to Dutch artists, and displays three significant paintings from Vermeer’s oeuvre of only 38 pictures. The Geographer comes from Frankfurt, The Astronomer from the Louvre, and the Allegory of the Catholic Faith from the New York Metropolitan Museum. None of Vermeer’s paintings have been exhibited in Hungary up to now.

The exhibition concludes with landscapes. Since a significant part of the Museum of Fine Arts’ holdings comprises landscapes, many of the important works exhibited here originate from the museum’s own collection, but beautiful pieces with this theme have been borrowed from abroad too. Two masters, namely Jacob van Ruisdael and Albert Cuyp, have been given an accentuated role among the winter, waterside, forest, sand and dune landscapes.

The final piece of the show is a video installation titled Rembrandt Morphs by contemporary artist Péter Forgács, which the Museum of Fine Arts purchased eight years ago from the material of the show Rembrandt: Contemporary Hungarian Artists Respond, linked to the exhibition Rembrandt400. The work presents the Dutch master’s 37 self-portraits using a computer programme.

The overall picture formed of the period is enriched by contemporaneous furniture, articles of everyday use and decorative objects from the Museum of Applied Arts, as well as maps, atlases and globes from the Széchényi Library. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue of over 600 pages in Hungarian and English, including five studies on the art of the period.