Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt

May 21 - August 14, 2016 - This exhibition will present about 40 of those drawings, covering five salient themes in the art history of the Netherlands during the 16th and 17th centuries. Works by the period’s outstanding draftsmen will be on view.

The first section, comprised of drawings from the 1500s, highlights the stylistic innovations precipitated by contact with Italian Renaissance models. A second group evokes the imagery propagated by a resurgent Catholic church in the southern Netherlands after the division of the Low Countries into an independent and officially Protestant North (the Dutch Republic) and a Catholic South ruled by regents of the Spanish monarchy. A third group shows the range of subjects and techniques explored in the drawings of Rembrandt and the adaptation of his draftsmanship by some of his pupils and close followers. The emergence of landscape as an autonomous artistic genre is the focus of the fourth section, which includes works by 16th-century precursors of the naturalistic landscape and illustrates several of the types of views depicted by Dutch 17th-century masters.