Skip to main content

Opening and Closing in January

Let's kick off the New Year with something a bit out of the ordinary: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at London's Royal Academy. This show features more than 130 works by 10 key 20th-century Brazilian artists, and most of them have never been on show in the UK before, providing a chance to look at modern art in a way that breaks from the European and North American perspective we're so used to. On from January 28 to April 21.   There are more familiar names at Bath's Holburne Museum: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol among them. Iconic: Portraiture from Bacon to Warhol  focuses on the middle of the 20th century when many artists began to use photographs as sources for their paintings. The exhibition runs from January 24 to May 5.  From January 22, the Louvre in Paris offers the chance to take  A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting . Cimabue, one of the most important artists of the 13th century, was among the...

Subscribe to updates

Non-Stop Rembrandt: 2019 Celebrates the Golden Age

You don't really need an excuse for a Rembrandt exhibition, but 2019 provides a perfect diary date: it's the 350th anniversary of his death, and some of the Netherlands' biggest galleries (and the Dutch tourism authorities) are celebrating with a year-long programme of events.

Let's start at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where they have two big shows planned. The gallery, home to the Night Watch, has the world's biggest collection of Rembrandts, and from February 15 to June 10 it's planning to display 22 paintings, 60 drawings and the 300 best examples of his prints in All the Rembrandts of the Rijksmuseum.
Towards the end of 2019, there's the mouth-watering prospect of a show comparing Rembrandt and his Spanish close contemporary Velazquez in what the Rijksmuseum says will be a comprehensive overview of paintings by the two great masters, with paintings hung in pairs. It's a collaboration with the Prado in Madrid, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary next year, and we're also promised Hals and Vermeer, Murillo, Zurbaran and Ribera. Rembrandt-Velazquez starts in Amsterdam on October 11 and will run through to January 19, 2020. The Prado hasn't announced its dates yet.

The commemorations actually get under way on November 24 this year with an exhibition at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden in the north-east Netherlands entitled Rembrandt and Saskia: Marriage in the Golden Age. Rembrandt married Saskia van Uylenburgh, who was from the city, in 1634, and she was the model for a number of his works.

Leeuwarden is a bit off the classic exhibition circuit, but it's one of Europe's capitals of culture this year, and the museum has put on a couple of eye-catching shows recently, including the very enjoyable one on Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema that travelled to Leighton House in Kensington last year. Rembrandt and Saskia in Leeuwarden runs until March 17. 

Also starting early next year is a show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague featuring the 18 paintings in its collection currently or previously attributed to Rembrandt, including the iconic Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. The aim is to look at the shifting perception of Rembrandt down the centuries.
Displays in the Mauritshuis's smallish new exhibition space are by no means the blockbusters the museum once put on but they do tend to be enlightening and well thought-out. This one can be seen from January 31 to September 15. It'll be followed by an exhibition with 30 paintings by Nicolaes Maes, a pupil of Rembrandt perhaps best known for his domestic scenes, running from October 17 to January 19, 2020.

Back in Amsterdam, the Rembrandt House Museum, in the building where the artist lived and worked for two decades, has got a series of exhibitions throughout 2019, including Rembrandt's Social Network, devoted to his family, friends and acquaintances. 

A highlight to close the year will come in Leiden, Rembrandt's home town, where the Lakenhal museum, due to reopen in spring 2019 after renovation, will host Young Rembrandt, an exhibition featuring some 40 paintings as well as drawings and etchings.

Among the works on loan will be the Man in Oriental Costume from the Met in New York. This show is being put on in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum, and after its run in Leiden from November 3 next year to February 9, 2020, it will be in Oxford from February 27 to June 7.

There are other opportunities to join the Rembrandt trail in Britain before then. Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master is the major exhibition at this year's Edinburgh Festival and is on at the Scottish National Gallery from July 7 to October 14. It brings together key works by Rembrandt in UK collections, as well as some that are no longer in Britain, such as The Mill, now in the National Gallery in Washington, and will also feature paintings by British artists influenced by Rembrandt, including Hogarth, Reynolds and Auerbach. 

And late next year, the Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Rembrandt's Light, featuring 35 loans from international collections focusing on his illumination and storytelling, including another masterpiece from Washington, Philemon and Baucis. It runs from October 2 to February 2, 2020.
The more enticing-looking exhibitions seem to be later in the year, so an enterprising pre-Christmas 2019 trip to Holland could take in Young Rembrandt in Leiden, Velazquez at the Rijksmuseum and Maes in The Hague, as well as another Golden Age favourite, Pieter de Hooch, who's the subject of his own show at the Prinsenhof in Delft, starting on October 11 next year.

Images

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul, 1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, Royal Collection Trust. (c) Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter  Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.  Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3.   Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...