From the museum website, 27 April 2010
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosts this fall a complete exhibition of works from the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Founded in 1816, the Städel Museum is home to one of Europe’s most important collections of 17th-century art, with a particular emphasis on Dutch and Flemish painting. This genre constituted the cornerstone of the collection amassed by Johann Friedrich Städel (1728-1816), which was used to found the museum that now bears his name.
The exhibition will feature iconic works by the leading masters of the Golden Age, offering an interesting reflection on how this period-a time of extraordinary historical and artistic interest-promoted the development of new pictorial genres and the redefinition of other traditional ones such as landscapes, portraits, still lifes, or historical paintings. The Geographer (1668-69), by Jan Vermeer van Delft, opens the exhibition, which also boasts works by great names such as Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Dirk van Baburen, and Frans Hals.