HEDGE-FUND bil lionaires, take note: The giant, gilt names atop the works of those old masters at the Met may one day be your own.
Adjust your wills accordingly.
For “The Age of Rembrandt,” opening tomorrow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has dusted off all 228 of its Dutch paintings and put them on display.
But what’s most striking about this show – aside from the thrill of seeing so many Vermeer portraits, Hobbema landscapes and Rembrandt-anythings in a row – is the emphasis placed on who gave what (and when).
Like most museums, the Met has always relied on the kindness of donors – particularly those named Vanderbilt, Marquand and Morgan, whose names, in the opening gallery, are writ larger than those of the painters.
Philippe de Montebello, the sonorous voice of the Met, calls the donor/collector “a very American phenomenon” for which the museum and its visitors are grateful.
And so, belated thanks to Henry G. Marquand, who, we’re told, paid just $800 back in 1887 for Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher,” the silvery purity of that pitcher and the leaded-glass window she’s opening a reflection, perhaps, of the maiden herself. Thanks, too, to meatpacking heiress Helen Swift for Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Young Woman With a Fan,” her lacy cuffs and ruby and pearl bracelets rendered in exquisite detail.
From other donors, well-known and not, came Abraham de Vries’ “Portrait of a Man” (circa 1590), whose lively eyes, mirthful mouth and reddish goatee would have suited Shakespeare to a T; Vermeer’s luminous, haunting “Study of a Young Woman and Franz Hals’ “The Smoker,” an octagonal painting of a ruddy man with a pipe and a wanton-looking woman at his side. (The inscription on the print reads, in part: “Indecent lovemaking and smoking are both bad for the soul, but only the latter will harm the body.”)
So many works by Dutch masters were donated by department-store magnate Benjamin Altman that he merits his own gallery in this show, one that includes Vermeer’s “A Maid Asleep,” with its half-smiling subject.
The wall text notes that, as a Jewish merchant of the time – the 1900s – Altman was “not one of the museum’s most considerately courted friends.” Even so, he went on to donate 19 Old Masters and another 30 other masterpieces.
We can only hope today’s Masters of the Universe will be as generous.
“The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” runs through Jan. 16.