Louvre Abu Dhabi made history when it opened its doors over a year ago as the first museum outside of France to carry the Louvre name.
It was then marketed as “a universal museum” celebrating cultural exchange and tolerance, and with the news that the museum will be exhibiting a rare Rembrandt artwork, it is on its way to achieving that goal.
Louvre Abu Dhabi as a part of its Dutch Golden Age exhibit will showcase 22 paintings and drawings by Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn.
The exhibition will include 95 works in total, including Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” alongside Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man” and “Study of the Head and Clasped Hands of a Young Man as Christ in Prayer”.
In November 2018, the art world was transfixed as Rembrandt’s Study of the Head and Clasped Hands of A Young Man As Christ in Prayer led Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening sale, selling for £9,48 million ($12 million) and according to famous auction house, it provided drama in the saleroom as this historic work came to auction for the first time in sixty years.
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 exhibit will be available to 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 seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art.
