Museum — 17th Century Dutch Art

A week ago I (finally) went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, to see the exhibition of paintings from the private collection of Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo. Apparently the van Otterloos have often lent paintings from their collection to museums here and in the Netherlands, but they have never done such a large exhibition. If I understood correctly, this is their entire collection. It ran in Salem from February 26 through June 19. It will move on to San Francisco and be at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from July 9 through October 2. Then it's on to Houston, where it will be at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from November 13, 2011 through February 12, 2012.

I found it very worthwhile. Of course, everybody's taste differs, but there were paintings in just about all the genres represented that really caught my eye: landscapes, seascapes, village and country scenes, interiors, and portraits. There is also a cute painting of a little sleeping dog.

The "catalogue" of the exhibition, as they call these things, is titled "Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie an Eijk van Otterloo Collection," and it's available through Amazon.com for under $41.00. (I bought it at the museum at list price of $65.00.) It's a big, heavy book, with 404 heavy stock pages, and, as an Amazon reviewer said, "All the works are beautifully illustrated, often with large, full-page reproductions, and a detailed presentation of each painting (description, meaning, provenance, exhibition history) accompanies each illustration." The same reviewer also said, "The collection's depth is absolutely breathtaking, from Rembrandt's 1632 Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh (the Van Otterloo's had to part with 18 works from their collection to be able to acquire it), to Saenredam's 1660 Interior of the St Bavokerk (only about 50 works by Saenredam have survived, most of them in museums), from Jacob Van Ruysdael's landscapes (three of them!) to Frans Hals's 1660 Portrait of a Preacher, etc." and, "An exceptional publication for an exceptional collection, and a must-have for any artlover's library."

So if you can get to the San Francisco or Houston showings, I think it will be well worth seeing. Whether or not you go, the book is a real bargain, IMO. You get to have and keep reproductions of all these beautiful paintings and pictures of the furniture from the same time and place which is also part of the exhibition; and it only costs you about twice or three times what you'd need to pay to get into the museum!