The exhibition “Treasures from Moscow. Dutch Drawings from the Pushkin Museum”

The exhibition Treasures from Moscow. Dutch Drawings from the Pushkin Museum will be on view from 18 March 2011 until 19 June 2011 in the Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht, Netherlands), opening on the same day as TEFAF 2011.

It is for the first time that the Pushkin Museum is sending such a representative exhibition of Dutch drawings abroad: 90 items on the show where its treasures came from – Holland, of all places!

Drawings from the Golden Age make the worthiest and least fragmented part of the Pushkin Museum’s collection of the Netherlandish graphic art . Works by the best known masters trace the development of the art of drawing throughout the 17th century Netherlands: from the late mannerists as Hendrick Goltzius and Abraham Bloemaert to the XVIII th century artists as Jacob de Wit and Cornelis Troost. An overwhelming majority of the exhibited drawings feature the period when Dutch art of the 17th century was at its best. These drawings were made by artists who defined the basic message of that period. A whole gamut of natural motifs of draftsmen’s home country - dunes, tree groves, plains, river banks, the sea, country cabins, and town towers - and portraits of the inhabitants demonstrate the drawings by Hendrick Avercamp, Esaias, Adriaen and Willem I van de Velde, Jan van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn, Gerard ter Borch the Younger, Cornelis II Visscher, Adriaen van Ostade and his students Cornelis Bega and Cornelis Dusart, Ludolf Bakhuizen, Herman and Cornelis Saftleven. Drawings by Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Nicolas Berchem, Thomas Wijck, Jacob van der Does, Pieter van Laer, Hendrick Verschuring and Jacob van der Ulft, serve to highlight the Dutch admiration of sunny Italy and Roman ruins.

Works by Rembrandt and artists of his circle are undisputed centre of the exhibition.

A number of drawings attributed to Ferdinand Bol, Jan Victors, and Nicolaes Maes, Willem Drost, Aert de Gelder, an emotionally charged landscape by Abraham Furnerius, two excellent drawings by Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, and a rare one, signed by Hendrick Heerschop – bear the The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts heaviest imprint of Rembrandt’s influence.

The Maastricht exhibition traces the history of Dutch drawing into the late 17th and even 18th centuries. Hardly any drawing of that period had previously been put on display.

The exhibition crowns painstaking efforts to publish the English - language version catalogue of the Pushkin Museum’s collection of Netherlandish, Dutch an Flemish drawings, by Prof.Vadim Sadkov, first published in Russian in 2001. A definitely different update of the 2001 catalogue is now available to the art connoisseurs of this planet.

The opening of this exhibition and the publication of the catalogue does credit to Pushkin’s Dutch counterparts: the Director of the Foundation for Cultural Inventory (Stichting Cultuur Inventarisatie Foundation, or SCI) Lia Gorter, Director Alexander van Grevenstein and custodian Lars Hendrikman of the Bonnefanten Museum, Director Dr. Rudi Ekkart and chief curator of old master paintings and drawings, Charles Dumas of the Netherlands Institute for Art History, (RKD - Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie), Den Haag (The Hague)The Prins Bernard foundation generously supported the exhibition and the publication of the catalogue .

Dutch Drawings from the Pushkin Museum (NL,ENG)

http://www.arts-museum.ru/events/archive/2011/03/treasures_from_moscow/index.php?lang=en

www.bonnefanten.nl

www.tefaf.com