Portrait of Dirck van Os, a 1658 painting long discredited as a Rembrandt copy, has been returned to public view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha as an officially authenticated portrait by the Dutch master. “People here sensed the underlying quality,” says Joslyn executive director, Jack Becker, “but you need the scholarly community to rehabilitate a picture like this.” (more…)
The much-beloved, floating Yellow Duck Sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman has burst again in the harbor of Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung. This is the second time the duck has burst in Taiwan, and may have been ruptured by eagles, which were reportedly attacking the sculpture. “We want to apologize to the fans of the yellow rubber duck….the weather is fine today and we haven’t found the cause of the problem. We will carefully examine the duck to determine the cause,” organizer Huang Jing-tai told reporters. (more…)
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), Courtesy of The Frick Collection
On view at The Frick Collection in New York is a traveling exhibition of beloved Dutch paintings selected from the collection of the Royal Picture Gallery Maurithuis in The Hague, the Netherlands. The paintings will remain on view to the public through January 19, 2014.
Fearing for her son, the suspect in the theft of seven paintings by Picasso, Monet and more from a Dutch Museum, a Romanian woman has come forth saying that she has burned the paintings in her stove. Olga Dogaru, the mother of suspect Rodu Dogaru, had buried the works when her son was arrested, and finally destroyed them in February. Investigators are analyzing the contents of her stove to check for evidence of the works, which were worth tens of millions of dollars. (more…)
Artist Jan Mostaert’s painting Discovery of America, depicting a group of Spanish soldiers aiming cannons at an indigenous group of people, has been purchased by the Rijksmuseum. Previously owned by Marei von Saher, the work had been taken from her father in law, dealer Jacques Goudstikker, by the Nazis during World War II, and was returned to von Saher in 2006. “It’s a picture that a lot of people were interested in both in North and South America because of it being such an important historical picture,” said dealer Hugo Nathan, “but Mostaert is arguably the most important early Dutch painter, as opposed to being a Flemish master, and the Rijksmuseum was always hoping to secure it for the Dutch nation.” (more…)
New research into the composition and techniques in the work of Vincent Van Gogh are challenging the perceptions of the artist as a spontaneous, romantic libertine in favor of a portrait of the Dutchman as a skilled and relentlessly committed technician. Presenting findings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a team of researchers have used new technologies and visualization equipment to analyze and uncover Van Gogh’s skillful approach to composing and arranging his paintings. “There has never been such extensive research into Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings,” says Nienke Bakker, Van Gogh Museum curator. (more…)
The Dutch Restitutions Committee has rejected the claim of two Jewish art dealers for all but one of 189 works in the country’s national collection. The committee did return one work, Ferdinand Bol’s Man With High Cap, but was unable to find enough evidence to return any of the other contested works. “Ownership of most of the works has not proved very probable,” the Dutch Restitutions Committee said in its recommendation, published late yesterday on its website. “During the occupation, the Katz brothers often acted as middlemen and intermediaries for German buyers.” (more…)
