Rembrandt’s Ancient Obsessions Are Made Anew in Upcoming Met Exhibition
Co-organized with the Louvre, "Rembrandt and the Ancients" opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in November 2027 and will travel to Paris in 2028.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan and the Musée du Louvre in Paris have joined forces to co-organize a major exhibition exploring Greco-Roman and biblical influences throughout Rembrandt's practice. As the first comprehensive presentation of Rembrandt at The Met in over 20 years, Rembrandt and the Ancients is set to open in November 2027 and will display multiple works by the Dutch master in the United States for the first time.
Assembled from both institutions' collections and a variety of international loans, the exhibition brings together over 125 objects, including Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and prints, along with a selection of influential historic reference materials.
Rembrandt's career took shape amid a prolific period of antiquities collecting during the Dutch Golden Age, as multiple high-profile merchants and collectors, including the Reijnst brothers, Johannes Smetius, and Franciscus Junius, developed extensive holdings of Ancient Greco-Roman and Renaissance-era artifacts, texts, and archaeological objects. The relatively recent invention of the printing press also enabled the mass distribution of classical, philosophical, and scientific texts translated into Dutch.
