Message of the Met’s “Age of Rembrandt” Show: Give Us Your Paintings!

Rembrandt, “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer”—A Rare Met Purchase
Many have remarked, sometimes with irritation, on the eccentric organizing principle behind the just-opened The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (to Jan. 6). Indeed, my fondest hope, after I learned the show’s title and before I learned that the museum’s 228 Dutch paintings were to be installed chronologically by acquisition date, was that we’d finally get to see the museum’s great Rembrandts installed together, as they briefly were a few years ago, when their usual galleries were undergoing renovation. We usually have to run around to see the Altman Rembrandts in the Altman galleries, the Lehman Rembrandt in the Lehman wing, and the rest of the Rembrandts in the Dutch galleries. A similarly disjointed display always exists for the Vermeers, for the same donor-driven reason.
But in the current show, where the donor is king, the display is more disjointed than ever. It can feel like an exasperating treasure hunt, as you try to sort out the gems from the trinkets. It might have expedited this task if the labels had designated which paintings came from the permanent collection galleries and which from storage.
It seems that even the curator, Walter Liedtke, couldn’t quite stay with the program. Not only did he banish some of the lesser works to another part of the museum, but he installed one still life out if its proper place in the acquisitions chronology. I couldn’t understand why it was there, until I turned to my right and saw another much larger still life, by a better known artist, with striking similarities in subject matter and composition. (I’ll let you treasure hunters find these for yourself.)
If you want to see all the Rembrandts all together, you can—in the enormous, expensive and erudite two-volume catalogue, organized alphabetically by artist. (I didn’t make the A-list for scarce press copies, so your faithful blogger and WNYC radio commentator ended up buying one, too.)
What seemed clear at the press preview was that the exhibition’s raison d’être is, in part, to honor past benefactors and encourage future ones—an urgent need at a time when the masterpiece market has so decisively outstripped museums’ relatively meager acquisitions funds.
In his brief remarks, the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, emphasized the point that the vast preponderance of works in the show, with the exception of those from the founding purchase of 174 paintings in 1871 (of which only 64 remain), came to the museum by way of donation. That includes all five Vermeers, all 11 Hals and all but one of the 20 Rembrandts.
The one Rembrandt purchase was, famously, “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” (above). In the catalogue, curator Liedtke recalls that Met staffers “consumed a fair amount of tea” in the library of Mrs. Alfred Erickson, the owner of that work, hoping that she might see fit to donate it. But they ultimately had to pay $2.3 million for it in 1961—then a record for any work at auction. Those were the days.
A few other fun facts, from the wall labels:
—“Fate smiled on the Metropolitan” when Henry Marquand paid a mere $800 to a Paris dealer for the museum’s most beloved Vermeer, “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.”
—Jules Bache paid Wildenstein Galleries $135,000 for what turned out to be a modern Vermeer forgery—“more than twice what Rembrandt’s ‘Standard Bearer‘ had cost him.”
—Locomotive manufacturerJacob Rogers of Paterson, NJ—not a collector but just an occasional visitor to the museum—must have been impressed when the Met’s then director, Luigi di Palma Cesnola, “would thank him in person for his annual dues of $10.” Rogers rewarded this courtesy in 1901 with an astonishing bequest of $5 million for acquisitions.
Would it help if Philippe exchanged pleasantries with visitors at the $20 admissions desk?