From 27 November 2024 to 23 March 2025, the Städel Museum presents the exhibition “Rembrandt’s Amsterdam Golden Times?”
Supply: Städel · Picture: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, “Anatomy lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman” (fragment), 1656
Amsterdam—one metropolis with many faces. Amsterdam was the metropolis in Europe throughout the seventeenth century. The economic system and commerce have been booming, the inhabitants quickly elevated, and the humanities and sciences flourished. An influential civic society formed the town’s fortunes, captured in necessary work by the best Dutch masters. In the beginning was Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, however the artists Jakob Backer, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Bartholomeus van der Helst and Jan Victors additionally replicate city society’s self-image in Amsterdam group portraits.
The Städel Museum presents the distinctive portrait artwork of Rembrandt and his contemporaries in a big exhibition, bringing collectively some 100 work, sculptures and prints, in addition to cultural and historic objects from main Dutch and worldwide museums.
The place to begin is a formidable assortment of group portraits from the Amsterdam Museum, enhanced by excellent works from the Städel Museum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, the Artwork Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, D.C. and the Nationwide Museum in Warsaw. Work from the interval referred to as “The Golden Age” within the Netherlands are critically questioned right here as a result of this financial and cultural flowering within the seventeenth century was based mostly on an aggressive commerce coverage of the Dutch Republic, whose foundations have been constructed on the institution of colonies in Asia and South America and the enslavement and exploitation of individuals. Wars, poverty, and spiritual and political persecution in Europe offered a steadily rising migration to the Dutch Republic, significantly to Amsterdam. A robust job market and normal spiritual tolerance gave many individuals hope for a greater and freer life, which many, however in no way everybody, succeeded in attaining. Above all, Amsterdam’s city elite has been intensively portrayed: Members of the marksmen’s guilds and “regents”, heads of social establishments supported by civil society.
The exhibition exhibits these official and prestigious work whereas concurrently casting its view onto how members of different social teams are represented. They’re photographs and histories of a pluralistic Amsterdam society, which inform of wealth and inequality, fortune and break, energy and powerlessness—narrated by way of an exhibition.
