From the museum website, 29 May 2013
This ravishing exhibition, featuring paintings generously lent by Her Majesty The Queen from the Royal Collection, explores the ways in which Dutch and Flemish artists of the seventeenth century revolutionised painting, looking at the world in new ways and developing new subjects and genres.
The show includes many masterpieces by the greatest artists of the period including Rubens, Rembrandt and Ruisdael. Highlights include Rembrandt’s famous image of an old woman, almost certainly his mother, Dutch landscapes and seascapes by Ruisdael, van der Heyden and Hobbema, a beautifully restrained still life by Willem C. Heda and characteristic genre scenes by Jan Steen and De Hooch among others including Dou’s jewel-like scene of a young girl chopping onions.
The Holburne has commissioned an audio guide to accompany the exhibition eliciting revealing responses to the works from experts in a variety of fields: A farmer examines Paulus Potter’s Bull; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall considers the cooking of onions and the Bishop of Salisbury responds to Rembrandt’s luminous image of Christ appearing to Mary Magdalen
The exhibition finds its perfect home at the Holburne Museum whose founding collection, assembled in the middle years of the nineteenth century was so influenced by George IV who was responsible for acquiring most of the paintings in the exhibition and whose taste for seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish works was of such importance establishing the national taste for these paintings which we celebrate in the 60th year since Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s, coronation.