Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario is home to a rich collection of Dutch and Flemish works in various media. Founded in 1900, the collection has grown through purchase and gift, including the recent arrival of the Thomson Collection. Paintings highlights include Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents and an oil sketch for his Raising of the Cross, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Lady with a Lap Dog, and portraits by Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck. Other painters represented include: Simon Bening, Bernart van Orley, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Frans Snyders, Gabriel Metsu, Tobias Verhaecht, Hendrick Andriessen, and Salomon van Ruysdael. The AGO has the world’s largest collection of gothic boxwood microcarvings, featured in a recent collaborative exhibition with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum (“Small Wonders”). Among many great works of Dutch and Flemish small-scale sculpture are several ivory and boxwood works by Francis van Bossuit.

Adam Harris Levine, Assistant Curator of European Art