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The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection
5 September 2018 – 13 January 2019
Nicholas Hall
On 4 September 2018, the exhibition “The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection” will open in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace. The State Hermitage will be presenting masterpieces of Dutch painting from one of the world’s most famous private collections of 17th-century Dutch painting. The Leiden Collection, named in honour of the Dutch city where Rembrandt was born, was founded in 2003 by Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, and comprises some 250 paintings and works of graphic art. The collection was first shown to the world at the Louvre in 2017. Following that, exhibitions were successfully held in the National Museum of China in Beijing and the Long Museum in Shanghai. In 2018, the masterpieces from the Leiden Collection are being welcomed in Russia – at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage.
Mr and Mrs Kaplan, passionate admirers of the work of Rembrandt and the artists of his time, have succeeded in our own day, when works by the geniuses of classic art have long since been portioned out among leading museums and private collections with deep historical roots, to accomplish a seemingly unrealizable goal: to assemble from scratch a representative and thematically diverse collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Vermeer and numerous small-scale works by painters of the local Leiden school known as fijnschilders – “fine-manner painters”.