Dutch painters of the seventeenth century enjoy worldwide fame for their depictions of everyday life. This book, which accompanies the exhibition Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time, includes many aspects of Dutch life that these painters portrayed. One not only sees in their paintings the appearance and character of the Dutch people, but also how they conducted their daily lives, both within and without the home. Some paintings depict the marketing and preparing foods, others show artists in their studios, learned scholars at desks overflowing with books, women intently writing letters, the pleasures of music, and, finally, the importance of the spiritual realm in daily life. Visitors to the Netherlands were struck by the beauty, cleanliness and opulence of the Dutch seventeenth-century home, which they praised in lyrical terms. Many paintings showed scenes of everyday life in Dutch interiors, some of which were richly appointed and finely decorated. Such abundance was not granted to everyone, of course, yet there is also some truth to this picture.
The Leiden Collection, one of the largest and most important private collections of Dutch seventeenth-century art, was founded by the French-American collector Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife Daphne Recanati Kaplan. To mark the 750th anniversary of the city of Amsterdam, and the 400th anniversary of the founding of New Amsterdam, the Leiden Collection has lent 75 outstanding works to H’ART Museum Amsterdam and to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Through these generous loans, the stories of seventeenth-century daily life in Amsterdam and New Amsterdam, has come alive through the expressive paintings of many important and influential Dutch seventeenth-century artists, including Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer.
