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The roughly 100 paintings on permanent exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum reflect the particular fondness of the collector – who acquired them between 1899 and 1953 – for the genres of portraiture and landscape painting.
The exhibition of these paintings begins in the gallery dedicated to fifteenth-century art, which displays a small collection of religious Flemish paintings. It includes two remarkable bust portraits previously belonging to an altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden. Visitors can also admire a splendid oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens depicting The Flight into Egypt, a common religious theme in the seventeenth century.
Portraiture occupies a prominent place in seventeenth-century painting and the artworks acquired in 1930 by Calouste Gulbenkian from the Antikvariat (the Soviet department set up to handle sales of artworks) include some of the most celebrated paintings in the collection: Portrait of Helena Fourment by Peter Paul Rubens, one of the collector’s particular favourites, and two paintings by Rembrandt, Old Man with a Stick and Pallas Athena (the latter produced with the collaboration of the master’s workshop), which previously belonged to the collection of Catherine II of Russia. To reflect the collector’s love of portraits, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum also exhibits Portrait of a Man by Anthony van Dyck and Portrait of Sara Andriesdr. Hessix by Frans Hals, both dating from the 1620s.
The Golden Age of Dutch landscape painting is represented by two paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael, a master of this genre: View from the Coast of Norway or A Stormy Sea Near the Coast and Church in a River Landscape, from the mid-1660s.
Luísa Sampaio, Head of Collections (March 2024)