In his recent vademecum to the Metropolitan Museum’s current Rembrandt exhibition, The New York Times critic Holland Cotter opened with this statement: “‘The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’ is a straightforward title for a complicated show.”[1] It could be argued that precisely the opposite is true. Whereas the title of the show would require several further qualifying sentences to be reasonably accurate, the show is simplicity itself: essentially a hanging of the near-total inventory of the museum’s holdings in this important area of European painting. A curator could ask for nothing easier. As to the title, identifying an entire school, spanning over a century, with the name of its most important and renowned exponent says almost nothing about the temporal, geographic, intellectual, and stylistic ingredients that, together, constitute the art of the so-called “Golden Age.” And yet, because we are in the realm of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, and because the museum’s inventory in this field is so rich, a straightforward “let it all hang out” approach has its own, surprising, rewards. By contrast, imagine an exhibit billed as “The Age of Caravaggio: Italian Baroque Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” or, even more to the point, “The Age of Titian: Venetian Painting … ,” etc.; impossible and meaningless exercises without the participation of abundant loans from European museums, churches, and palaces.
There is a reason, therefore, why this in-house “Rembrandt show” makes sense. With its 228 items on display, it