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Hidden Treasures

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection boasts more than 154,000 objects, only eight percent of which are on permanent display. In this column members of the museum’s staff choose their favourite artworks, now still hidden behind closed doors, but soon to be on display in the depot. This time it is the turn of Friso Lammertse, the Curator of Old Paintings and Sculptures.

"Our collection of old paintings and sculpture contains some 900 paintings and 200 sculptures, from around 1300 to around 1850-60. The collection of old art has a relatively large number of small paintings and a great many unbelievably fine works. We have many Dutch paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and quite a few Italian and French artworks. This makes us the only museum in the Netherlands to have a Titian and a Watteau. And even a painting by Dürer too! Obviously we can’t show all of these many hundreds of paintings and sculptures in the museum. For all kinds of reasons, we have to make choices about what we actually do hang and exhibit. I have an almost personal connection with some of our ‘hidden treasures’ which, I am delighted to say, will all soon be on display in the depot."

Medieval Statue
Arnold de Maeler and Reinier van Thienen, Statue of St Leonard, 1480, brass, 56 x 18 x 14 cm.

Medieval Statue

"This brass figure is one of the finest we have from the fifteenth century. It was made for a church in Zoutleeuw, near Brussels. The interior of this church was one of the very few to survive the ravages of the Iconoclasm almost intact. All the altarpieces are still in situ. In the nineteenth century a few works of art were sold, among them this figure of St Leonard, which dates from around 1480. It is extremely unusual to know where a medieval statue came from and the names of the artists. De Maeler designed it and Van Thienen cast it in brass. We see a saint in a monk’s habit, holding a lantern and a book. Many medieval statues are idealized, but this saint has a very distinctive face: emotional and personal."

View this work on the Collection Online
Dutch Painting (I)
Hendrik Maertensz Sorgh, Girl at the Window, 1659, oil on panel, 21 x 18 cm.

Dutch Painting (I)

"I think this is a really nice little painting, but because it’s so small it is seldom hung in a gallery. The cropping is unusual: most of the panel is occupied by the architecture. This is something you don’t often come across in seventeenth-century paintings. The charm is primarily in the three figures – the girl hanging out of the window and the two boys trying to look over her shoulders to see what’s going on in the street. The viewer does not know what has captured her attention. The chamber pot on the wall might be a clue. Surely she wouldn’t have emptied the pot straight out of the window? A habit that was the subject of repeated complaints in the seventeenth century…"

View this work on the Collection Online

I have an almost personal connection with some of our ‘hidden treasures’ which, I am delighted to say, will all soon be on display in the depot.

Curator of Old Paintings and Sculptures.

Dutch Painting (II)
Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Mountain Landscape in the Setting Sun, 1849, oil on panel, 38 x 51 cm.

Dutch Painting (II)

"At present there are hardly any nineteenth-century Dutch paintings on display in the museum, although this period is actually well represented in our collection. The work of this era has perhaps fallen out of fashion. What makes ‘Mountain Landscape in the Setting Sun’ so special is the incredibly beautiful light permeating the painting and evoking a superb atmosphere. It is probably a view of the Neandertal, the valley in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia which gave its name to Neanderthal Man. Dutch painters had been making ‘Italianate’ landscapes since the seventeenth century: they incorporated Mediterranean clouds and golden yellow light in their works. This suggests a yearning for the sun and a different kind of life. In early nineteenth-century art there is a deep love of balanced beauty, lovely skies, and people happily strolling through the landscape. It is almost an idealized image. The painting always makes me feel happy; it even gives me a holiday feeling."

View this work on the Collection Online
Italian Painting
Bernardo Cavallino, St Catherine of Alexandria, 1645-55, oil on canvas, 68 x 58 cm

Italian Painting

"Seventeenth-century Italian paintings are rare in the Netherlands. This is one of the finest of these works we have. It was made by the Neapolitan painter Bernardo Cavallino. What I find so attractive about it is the relaxed manner and the completely individual handling of the brush. Cavallino is a painter you can easily identify from his hand. St Catherine’s melancholy look and her gesture are most unusual. That scrawny little twig is a palm, a traditional symbol of glory and victory. It rests on a wooden wheel, the instrument of torture on which Catherine died. The painting has no hint of the triumph of suffering that we sometimes encounter in that period. It conveys a sense of profound sadness."

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Dutch Painting (III)
Cornelis van Dalem, The Dawn of Civilization, 1560-70, oil on panel, 88,5 x 164 cm.

Dutch Painting (III)

"This magnificent sixteenth-century landscape by Cornelis van Dalem shows the dawn of civilization. It is a strange rocky landscape, where men and women dressed in animal skins walk around. The way Van Dalem painted the trees against the sky is unutterably beautiful. It is very unusual for an artist to create an emotion that defies description by painting trees and sky. But this is what you want from painting: that it is transcendent – and I think that’s the astounding thing here. I always look at an artist’s workmanship. Until the nineteenth century there was a difference in professional competence – what someone could ‘do’. You didn’t exist as an artist without a good technique. For us, too, it is very pleasing to look at beautifully painted folds or faces rendered almost three-dimensionally. I have a profound admiration for artists who master such techniques."

View this work on the Collection Online

Depot Journal

This article has been published before in Depot Journal #2 which is part of a series of six. If you would like to receive all the printed Depot journals by post, please send an email to info@boijmans.nl with your full name and address, reference ‘receive Depot Journals’.