Travel Pick: Art and Archaeology in United States
Age of Rembrandt

The exhibition presents the Museum's entire collection of Dutch paintings (ca. 1600 - 1800) in approximate order of acquisition, from the founding purchase of 1871, to the major gifts and bequests of the 1880s through the 1940s, and finally to the strategic accessions of the 1950s onward. Many of the 174 paintings acquired in the "1871 Purchase" made by the Museum were from the Dutch school, including masterworks such as Jan van Goyen's View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmer Meer and Salomon van Ruysdael's Drawing the Eel.

Later, millionaires of the Gilded Age (ca. 1875-1900) such as Henry Marquand, J. P. Morgan, and Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer – sought out masterpieces by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Ruisdael, among other Dutch artists.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns 20 paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn (including such famous works as Aristotle with a Bust of Homer and his Self-portrait of 1660), 11 paintings by Frans Hals, and five of the 35 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. Also in the collection are exceptional groups of Dutch landscape painting (by Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, Aelbert Cuyp, and other masters) and of genre pictures (scenes of everyday life), still lifes, marine views, portraits, and historical and biblical subjects.