Columns by Gary Schwartz, mainly on Dutch and Flemish art, art history and museums. Since September 1995 (online since May 2004).
The print room of the Rijksmuseum mounted magnificent exhibitions on two very different Dutch landscape artists, the portrayer of Brazil Frans Post and the traveler in his own imagination Hercules Segers. The juxtaposition brings Schwartz to compare them; he finds out that they both came to the same sorry end. Continue reading “349 The difference between Frans Post and Hercules Segers”
The deal is done. The Louvre and Rijksmuseum have come into shared ownership of Rembrandt’s earliest full-length, life-size portraits. Buyers and sellers proclaim piously that they were driven by angst that these cultural treasures might disappear to Arabia or China. Schwartz tests that proposition and finds it wanting. Continue reading “344 Some Rothschild Rembrandts, seen and unseen”
Summer excursions to Antwerp and Norfolk richly repay the effort. In the cathedral of Antwerp and the country house of Robert Walpole, exhibition curators have done their best to put back in their place paintings long removed from their homes. Continue reading “326 Antwerp and Houghton Hall rehung”
