Treasures from Moscow. Dutch drawings from the Pushkin Museum
18.03 – 19.06.2011From March 18th onwards, the Moscow based State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts stages a major exhibition of Dutch drawings in the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. This is the first time that the Pushkin Museum is sending such a large number of Dutch drawings abroad. There will be ninety items on show until June 19th 2011. The exhibition opens on the same day as TEFAF 2011. Most of the drawings date from the period when seventeenth-century Dutch art was at its peak, and were made by artists who defined the spirit of the times.
Drawings from the Golden Age are only a part of the Moscow collection of Dutch prints and drawings, but they are the best and most coherent part. These works, by the leading masters, trace the development of Dutch drawing from the late sixteenth until the early eighteenth centuries.
Works by Rembrandt and artists in his circle are the undisputed centre of all Dutch exhibitions and the Maastricht show is no exception in this. Over the past few decades however, a critical approach to Rembrandt's oeuvre, not least by Dutch art historians, has reduced the number of Rembrandt attributions significantly. Yet, the Sketch of a Woman Holding a Child, is considered as an indisputable Rembrandt. A product of the late 1640s, it demonstrates Rembrandt's incomparable ability to show a human figure in a shaft of light and air with just a few strokes of the pen.
The most famous drawing in the Moscow collection and the logo of the exhibition, Woman Making Pancakes (also known as The Kitchen in Rembrandt's House), has long been attributed to Rembrandt's school – in the catalogue to Jan Victors – and not to Rembrandt himself. A number of drawings attributed to Ferdinand Bol, Jan Victors, Nicolaes Maes, Willem Drost, Aert de Gelder, an emotionally charged landscape by Abraham Furnerius, two excellent drawings by Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, and a rare one signed by Hendrick Heerschop reflect Rembrandt's influence most strongly.
A considerable part of the exhibition is devoted to the group known as the Italianates – Dutch artists who went to Rome to study. It were the landscape painters who dominated this field. Without a doubt, Nicolas Berchem stands out as one of the leaders of the Italianates. Four drawings do credit to this artist, but one of them – Fantastic Creature in a Landscape – is unique. Berchem's flickering brush produced a beautiful Italian landscape with a fantastic creature: a seven-headed and seven-armed satyr. Attempts to explain this flight of fancy have proved futile.
The exhibition curators were able to complement the easily attributable, most characteristic and rarest works with debatable drawings whose attribution is open to question. Although they undertook extensive research and made every effort to tie up all the loose ends, there are still uncertainties, and in-debt research continues to this day. This means that the exhibition is also an important tool for further in-depth probing.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by the extensive scholarly catalogue: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts - Netherlandish, Flemish and Dutch Drawings of the XVI-XVIII Centuries, Belgian and Dutch Drawings of the XIX-XX Centuries. This catalogue, which is based on the existing Russian catalogue, was compiled on the initiative of the Foundation for Cultural Inventory (SCI) together with the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, under the supervision of Charles Dumas from the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).
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Beeldmateriaal
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Jan Victors (attributed to) (kat 342)
1619 Amsterdam – East Indies 1676
Woman making Pancakes (the so-called ‘Kitchen in Rembrandt’s House’)
pen and brush and brown ink, red chalk, brown wash, 195 x 298 mm
inv. 4712 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Hendrick Avercamp (kat 2)
1585 Amsterdam – Kampen 1634
Nine Peasants around a Wheelbarrow
pen and brown ink, watercolour, 105 x 171 mm
inv. 4631 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Adriaen van Ostade (kat 316)
1610 – Haarlem – 1685
Group of Peasants in the doorway of a Farmhouse
pen and brown and grey ink, watercolour and gouache, 276 x 215 mm
inv. 4708 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Cornelis Troost (kat 412)
1696 - Amsterdam – 1750
The Sword of Damocles, 1747
pen and grey and brown ink, watercolour and gouache, 554 x 936 mm
inv. 1971 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Rembrandt van Rijn (kat 339)
1606 Leiden – Amsterdam 1669
Sketch of a Woman holding a Child
pen and brown ink, corrected with white, 110 x 67 mm
inv. 4713 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Jan van Goyen (kat 165)
1596 Leiden – The Hague 1656
Coaching Inn and a cart driving off, 1652
black chalk, grey wash, 120 x 198 mm
inv. 4525 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Nicolaes Berchem (kat 38)
1621/22 Haarlem – Amsterdam 1683
Fantastic Creature in a Landscape
pen and brush and brown ink, brown wash, 275 x 188 mm
inv. 4518 © State Pushkin Museum Moskou. |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Peter Cox |
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Foto Ernst van Loon |
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Foto Ernst van Loon |
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Foto Ernst van Loon |
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Foto Ernst van Loon |