Description

The Leiden Collection, created by Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, has assembled over 250 paintings in the past fifteen years including masterpieces by Rembrandt and many of the finest artists from the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. The Collection has extraordinary depth and breadth with artists working in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, including early Rembrandt, but also outstanding works by Jan Lievens, Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris, who spent their entire lives in their native town. Following Rembrandt, who moved to Amsterdam, the Collection also contains a trove of paintings by masters who worked there but also in Utrecht, and Antwerp in the Southern Netherlands, as well as the Haarlem master Frans Hals and the famed Johannes Vermeer of Delft. The Collection's primary focus is on portraits, genre subjects, and history scenes, paintings where the human figure, whether singularly or in relationship to others, represents the focus of the artist's concerns. Above all, this richly layered collection, with Rembrandt at its core, allows one to examine the multifaceted relationships that existed among artists working within and beyond the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth century. This will be the first old master exhibition ever to be held in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and will take place at the National Museum.