Dutch Primitives.(Report from Europe)(dutch art exhibition)

The Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century--the so-called Golden Age--are well known, as are the names of their famous practitioners. Less familiar are the paintings and altarpieces of the earlier fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Netherlands. Commissioned by rich and pious merchants, these works were mostly devotional and often decorated the whitewashed interiors of churches. Since it was common practice to place biblical stories in contemporary settings, these paintings with their keenly observed details offer insight into Dutch life at the time. Dutch portraiture can also trace its origins to these altarpieces as well as to the missals and illuminated books that contain likenesses of their donors or owners. Because many works of art were destroyed in the iconoclastic religious upheavals of the late sixteenth century, those that remain are rare, most especially the pictures from the sea provinces of Holland and Zeeland in the northern Netherlands.

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Dutch Primitives: Paintings from the Late Middle Ages, an exhibition on view at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam until May 25, brings together sixty paintings from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These works are complemented by a large group of colored sculptures dating from 1350 to 1500, part of the Schoufour-Martin ...