Over the past 35 years, husband-and-wife collector duo Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo have acquired an unparalleled private collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, representing a selection of work by the Dutch Golden Age’s most important artists. This volume compiles some two dozen masterworks from the van Otterloo Collection, which was donated by the couple to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2017, as one of the most generous gifts in the museum’s history.
Included among these visually splendid paintings is one of the world’s best-preserved Rembrandts, previously housed in a private collection: his 1632 piece Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh, which depicts its elderly sitter in dark robes and a delicate white millstone collar. Works by other Dutch Masters such as Cuyp, Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Jan Brueghel the Elder round out the collection with a variety of pictorial subjects, from genre scenes to seascapes to still lifes.
Accompanied by biographical and art historical information to provide context for the artists and their work, the series of lavish reproductions assembled in this volume invites readers to immerse themselves in the careful composition and beautiful light quality of this era’s finest paintings.
