Now on View: A Guide to Looking in the Redesigned Northern European Galleries

One of the goals of The Cleveland Museum of Art’s recent strategic plan, Making Art Matter, is to refresh two to five galleries each year in order to enhance the installation of the permanent collection. We will experiment with new interpretative strategies and feature recent acquisitions as a way to remind visitors that the museum is dynamic and ever changing. Last summer we reinstalled the galleries at the south entrance, where we display the collections of decorative arts by Tiffany and Fabergé. This December we unveil the newly installed galleries devoted to the art of northern Europe.

Following a dramatic redesign, the Harold C. Schott Foundation Gallery (gallery 213), the Walter and Jean Kalberer Foundation Gallery (gallery 214), and the Samuel Rosenthal Family Gallery (gallery 215) have reopened. Gallery 213 features paintings and decorative arts that could have furnished domestic interiors of Netherlandish homes during the seventeenth century. Formal portraits by artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals are shown alongside landscapes of the Dutch countryside by Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan van Goyen and luminous still life paintings of gooseberries by Adriaen Coorte and flowers by Ambrosius Bosschaert.

Don’t miss recently acquired paintings of a smiling violin player holding a wineglass by Dirck van Baburen and a splendid, monumental painting of a table laid with a feast by Jacob van Hulsdonck. The still life includes not only fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and accompanying condiments but even a broken glass. See if you can locate the fly perched on the stem of a pear.

Visitors will also discover a large Dutch kast (wardrobe) in this gallery, topped with blue and white porcelain vases from China, the likes of which were imported into the Netherlands from Asia by the Dutch East India Company during the seventeenth century. Be sure to look for the cup carved from a coconut shell and mounted with silver.

“In thinking about the reinstallation, I wanted to find ways to help visitors consider how these objects would have been viewed and collected at the time they were made,” explained Marjorie E. Wieseman, Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos Jr. Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, 1500–1800, and chair of European art from classical antiquity to 1800.

“In thinking about the reinstallation, I wanted to find ways to help visitors consider how these objects would have been viewed and collected at the time they were made…”— Marjorie E. Wieseman, Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos Jr. Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, 1500–1800, and chair of European art from classical antiquity to 1800

“For example, in the Dutch gallery (213) that contains mostly art produced in the Netherlands during the 1600s, nearly all of the paintings are small-scale works with secular subjects — so different from the large religious pieces seen in nearby galleries with Italian and Spanish art from the same period,” she notes. “These objects were made to decorate relatively compact urban homes — not churches or palaces — and many of the subjects are the same ones we might choose today: landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and scenes of everyday life.”

Gallery 214 highlights religious paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts produced in Germany and central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The recently acquired Resurrection of Christ, Johann König’s largest and most ambitious painting on copper, appears in this gallery alongside other compositions dedicated to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and a scene from the life of Christ by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, both studies for large church altarpieces.

While gallery 213 transports visitors to a Dutch home in the early seventeenth century, and gallery 214 conjures Baroque ecclesiastical interiors of Germany, gallery 215 introduces visitors to an elegant, aristocratic French interior of the early eighteenth century. Wealthy French collectors avidly acquired late seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings that they showed alongside early eighteenth-century French paintings and decorative arts that revealed a similarly refined aesthetic.

When you visit the gallery, notice in particular how Dutch genre subjects by Pieter de Hooch and Jacob Ochtervelt are complimented by French paintings made just a few decades later by artists such as Jean François de Troy and Hyacinthe Rigaud. Look for a clock made with tortoise shell and brass inlay, a silver and gilt cup and tankard, and a set of chairs made by the Savonnerie factory, each upholstered with a different scene representing the four seasons.

“In thinking about this update of the northern European galleries from a decorative arts perspective,” said Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design, “I wanted to introduce furniture and objects into the Dutch gallery (213) in order to present a more contextual installation as well as to reposition the furniture within the early French and German gallery (215), creating new associations between works.” He notes, “These arrangements allow us to offer new vistas and new ways of looking at the decorative arts within the context of our renowned paintings and sculpture from the 1600s and early 1700s.”

“These arrangements allow us to offer new vistas and new ways of looking at the decorative arts within the context of our renowned paintings and sculpture from the 1600s and early 1700s.”— Stephen Harrison, Curator of Decorative Art and Design

See a series of images from the reimagined galleries below, and come see them in person now!