Don't be fooled: the Mauritshuis is not a museum – it's a Royal Gallery designated with the best possible taste. As a Gallery – and a little bit as a museum – the curators program small exhibitions like this one “A Room for Art”, that will end next Monday (that is, the last day to visit in Sunday June 27th, 2010).
When I talk about small exhibitions I mean one or two small rooms with at the most three master works in the theme that they're talking about. In this case, it goes about the rooms that very rich collectors and sponsors of artists in the XVIIth century had to keep all the works they patronized. They could very well be rooms in their own houses or in the houses of the artists that used to work for them.
The exhibition is, as customary in Mauritshuis, small and enough. You have only seven works of art to carefully lay eyes in that idea of mega-painting , that many times was made as a concert: a lot of painters working in such portrait of the extraordinary collections of work sponsored by those who also where extraordinarily rich.
That's what I liked the most: the idea of a group of painting agreeing in painting in the same canvas, to portrait as many masterpieces as they could as a group, trying to portray that reality of richness hidden in such “Rooms for Art” in the old Antwerp.
(The image that illustrates this post is one of the paintings, made by W. van Haecht and entitled "Alexander the Great visiting the studio of Apelles".)
Mauritshuis-The Royal Picture Gallery
Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague.
Adult entrance price: 12,00€ (2010)
Opening hours - visit web page, they change through the year. In summer they open everyday.
1 comment:
and 2 vermeer in it...i loved it :)
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