The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 65, no. 1 (Summer, 2007). — New-York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. — 74 p.
The Metropolitan is home to the finest collection of Dutch art outside of Europe. This major exhibition, which coincides with the publication of the first catalogue of the collection, presents the Museum's entire collection of Dutch paintings (ca. 1600–1800) in approximate order of acquisition, from the founding purchase of 1871, to the major gifts and bequests of the 1880s through the 1940s, and finally to the strategic accessions of the 1950s onward. Reflecting how the Museum's great collection of Dutch paintings is closely linked with the institution's history, the installation outlines how the collection was formed, following the taste for Dutch art in America and among New York's great collectors.
Many of the 174 paintings acquired in the "1871 Purchase" made by the Museum were from the Dutch school, including masterworks such as Jan van Goyen's View of Haarlem and the Haarlemmer Meer and Salomon van Ruysdael's Drawing the Eel. These paintings were coveted on both sides of the Atlantic and secured the young Museum an "enviably solid foundation for future acquisition and development," as Henry James wrote in a well-known essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in the summer of 1872.
