Information from the museum, 4 November 2014
1 November 2014 – 25 January 2015 (Part 1)
31 January 2015 – 26 April 2015 (Part 2)
2 May 2015 – 26 July 2015 (Part 3)
After the successful first venue of Bosch to Bloemaert. Early Netherlandish Drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in the Fondation Custodia in Paris (22 March – 22 June 2014) the drawings are now going on display ‘back home’ in Rotterdam, in three successive parts. In 2017 the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen owns one of the most important collections of early Netherlandish drawings. They were made by Dutch and Flemish artists born before 1581. Many come from the collections of Frans Boijmans (acquired in 1847) and Franz Koenigs (acquired in 1940). Several, though, have been bought in the past few decades, two of them very recently. These 400 drawings have been published in a scholarly collection catalogue which is available online on the museum’s website. More than 140 of them were selected for the exhibition.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents its drawings in the Print Room gallery on the ground floor behind the main entry. Because this gallery can hold a maximum of 45 exhibits at a time, the exhibition will be shown in three successive stages, each one being a more or less chronological presentation of drawings by well-known artists like Pieter Bruegel, Hans Bol, Hendrick Goltzius, Jacques de Gheyn and Abraham Bloemaert, but also by less familiar names. Two rare drawings by Jheronimus Bosch will be on show in the first two parts. The various genres – landscapes, portraits, biblical scenes, historical and mythological subjects – will be represented in each part. So will the functions of drawings, from preparatory studies for paintings and designs for prints to finished works of art in their own right that were made for collectors.
The English exhibition catalogue, already sold out halfway the Paris venue, is available in the museum shop (it can also be ordered online):
Yvonne Bleyerveld, Albert J. Elen, Judith Niessen (e.a.), Bosch to Bloemaert. Early Netherlandish Drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Paris (Fondation Custodia), Bussum (THOTH Publishers) 2014.
The free visitor’s guide (A5 format, 44 pages, in a Dutch and an English version) can be downloaded from the museum’s website: Dutch version | English version.