The exhibition Light in the Darkness: 17th Century Dutch Painting in Croatian Collections is the first in the new exhibition series at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery under the working title: Golden Periods of European Art – Examples from Croatian Collections. The preparatory work for the exhibition was conducted as part of the project Provenance Research on Artwork in Zagreb Collections, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. As a result, special attention in the organization of the exhibition was dedicated not only to the latest insights into seventeenth-century Dutch painting but also to the theme of collecting and current research on the provenance of artworks in domestic collections.

The exhibition includes around a hundred paintings, prints and applied art objects, as well as a reconstruction of a women’s costume composition, which was made after the Portrait of an Elegant Lady in the Mimara Museum. The reconstruction was made at the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb by Irena Šabarić Škugor and Franka Karin, with the help of Katarina Nina Simončič.

The works created by Dutch masters in the seventeenth century, which are now in Croatian public collections, are concentrated in the northern part of the country. With the exception of individuals such as Cardinal Juraj Haulik (1788-1869) and Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815-1905), who collected a limited number of paintings by Dutch masters in the nineteenth century, most of the exhibited paintings arrived in Croatia in the twentieth century.

Although Bishop Strossmayer did not amass a large collection of Dutch paintings, his efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century and the opening of the Old Masters Gallery 140 years ago encouraged other donors to enrich the public gallery bearing his name. Thanks to the continuous expansion of the collection through donations and acquisitions, the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters now has the richest collection of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in Croatia, with about 40 paintings. In addition to the works of art collected in museums, in the first decades of the twentieth century works by Dutch masters also found their way into private collections.

Almost a third of the artworks presented in this exhibition were imported from abroad and donated to two Zagreb public collections by Ante Topić Mimara (1889–1987). His extensive collection, which grew during his lifetime to around 4.000 artworks of all types, styles, and periods, included several dozen Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century. The first donation was made to the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters in 1967. These paintings were presented to the public at an exhibition organized in 1969. Several years later, in 1973, Topić donated a larger portion of his collection with the intend to establish a museum that would bear his name: the Mimara Museum. About fifteen years passed from the signing of this donation agreement to the opening of the museum in 1987. The current exhibition marks the first opportunity to view Topić’s collection of Dutch masters and their followers as a whole.

Another significant collection imported during this period was that of Bishop Đuro Kokša (1922–1998), who acquired entire collections on foreign art markets and imported them into Croatia. The first inventory of the collection was compiled by Đuro Vanđura, and among the hundred or so old masters, several paintings were attributed to Dutch and Flemish masters.

Catalogue

The exhibition Light in the Darkness: 17th Century Dutch Painting in Croatian Collections provides an overview of Dutch painting, prints, and drawings in Croatian collections. Since many of the exhibited artworks are only rarely available to the public, such as in this exhibition, the extensive catalogue (ISBN 978-953-271-157-8, Croatian), in which these works are thoroughly addressed through 108 catalogue entries, will greatly contribute to the understanding of this corpus of Baroque art in Croatia.

Exhibition author: Ivan Ferenčak, Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Exhibition curator: Valentina Bach, Klovićevi Dvori Gallery