The High Museum of Art has announced it will present “Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston” from April 19 through July 14, 2024.
The exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings, prints, maps and decorative art objects spanning the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries by the period’s leading Dutch artists, including Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Willem Kalf and Rachel Ruysch.
The display explores how Dutch preeminence in international maritime trade and the influx of new goods and information transformed life in the Netherlands and led to a remarkable cultural flowering. The art of this period reflects how the Dutch wished to represent themselves, their ideals and their concerns.
Few artists addressed the human toll of colonialism head-on, but many paintings reveal the influence of international expansion on Dutch art and society. The exhibition addresses these complex histories through up-to-date scholarship, contextualizing 17th- and 18th-century Dutch art in a fresh, compelling way.
“This wonderful exhibition from the MFA opens a door for us to reflect upon a remarkably dynamic and complex history via quintessential artworks of that era and region,” said Rand Suffolk, director of the High. “We look forward to sharing that experience with our audiences.”
“We are fortunate to be able to present this extraordinary collection of Dutch masterpieces from the 17th and 18th centuries; they are superlative works by the period’s greatest artists and designers,” said Claudia Einecke, the High’s France B. Bunzl Family curator of European art. “However, even more exciting is how their images and objects gain fresh interest and new significance in this exhibition by being seen through the lens of globalism and interpreted in terms of the economic, political and cultural realities that shaped art and society at the time.”
This exhibition was curated by Anna C. Knaap, assistant curator of paintings; Frederick Ilchman, Mrs. Russell W. Baker curator of paintings and chair of art of Europe; and colleagues at the MFA.
