We all know that Rembrandt is a world-famous artist, but that a major exhibition was devoted to him and his Academy in the autumn of 2003 in Japan is perhaps less well known. In collaboration with the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin an impressive selection of leading works from the Dutch Golden Age was compiled for a presentation at the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.
The show consisted of paintings by so-called pre-Rembrandtists, thirteen paintings and numerous prints by Rembrandt himself and a large selection of works by his pupils. The generous cooperation of various European and American museums and a number of
art dealers made this Japanese excursion into seventeenth-century Dutch art possible. Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder lent three paintings, including The Stoning of St Paul and St Barnabas at Lystra by Barent Fabritius.
A salient detail is that Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder had organised a similar exhibition ten years earlier and had published an accompanying catalogue together with Paul Huys Jansen and Werner Sumowski under the same title: Rembrandt’s
Academy.
Rembrandt and the Rembrandt School: The Bible, Mythology and Ancient History at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 13 September - 14 December 2003