Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan, founders of The Leiden Collection, today announced the appointment of Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt to serve as Curator of the family’s collection of more than 250 17th-century Dutch Master paintings and drawings.  

A specialist in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art, Dr. Yeager-Crasselt previously held positions at the Clark Art Institute, the National Gallery of Art, and KU Leuven (as a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellow) and has taught at the Catholic University of America and George Washington University. One of the finest of her generation of scholars studying the Old Masters, she is the author of Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome and Brussels (Brepols Publishers, 2015), as well as numerous essays and catalogue entries on the art of the Netherlands and Italy in the early modern period.  Dr. Yeager-Crasselt received her Ph.D. in art history, under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Wheelock, from the University of Maryland in 2013.

Thomas Kaplan said “Daphne and I are delighted to welcome Lara Yeager-Crasselt to The Leiden Collection’s team as we enter a new phase as collectors. We have always seen our role as taking art from private hands and placing it into the public domain.  For years, the Collection has served as the leading Lending Library of Dutch Golden Age paintings to museums. The decision to make the Collection, and the large body of scholarship that accompanies these works, freely available online has only reinforced our belief that these works are to be shared widely. As we embark for the first time upon multiple exhibitions of a large body of highlights of the Collection to the public, Lara brings an invaluable combination of vision, far-ranging scholarship, and comprehensive professionalism.”

Lara Yeager-Crasselt said: “I am thrilled to be working with The Leiden Collection, which is without question the opportunity of a lifetime.  I look forward to helping the Kaplan family share these works with the public and to continuing the Kaplans’ efforts to encourage and disseminate new scholarship on Rembrandt and his School and 17th-century Dutch art more broadly.” 

The Leiden Collection

Founded by Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan and Daphne Recanati Kaplan, The Leiden Collection, consisting of more than 250 paintings and drawings, is among the largest collections of seventeenth-century Dutch art in private hands. It includes masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn and the fine painters of the Leiden school, including Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu and Godefridus Schalcken. It also features important works by other Dutch masters, among them: Frans Hals, Carel Fabritius, Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer. Though heretofore almost entirely anonymous in its loans, The Leiden Collection is a lending library of Old Masters; over 170 loans of artworks have been made to date to major museums in Europe, the United States, and Japan. A selection of highlights from these holdings is on view at the Musée du Louvre in Paris through May 22, 2017 in an exhibition entitled Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection: The Age of Rembrandt.  An expanded exhibition of The Leiden Collection thereafter will travel to Beijing and Shanghai.

The online catalogue of The Leiden Collection, published in January 2017, is accessible to scholars and the public at www.theleidencollection.com.

Source: The Leiden Collection's press release, 15 March 2017