The Met to Present First Comprehensive Exhibition Dedicated to Rembrandt’s Lifelong Engagement with the Ancient World
Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899, 2nd floor
—On November 7, 2027, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Rembrandt and the Ancients, an in-depth exploration of the Dutch master’s lifelong creative engagement with the history, art, and literature of ancient Greece, Rome, and the wider Mediterranean world. Marking The Met’s first major exhibition dedicated to Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) in more than 20 years, it will feature more than 125 works of art, including some 70 of Rembrandt’s paintings, prints, and drawings—many on view in the United States for the first time—and key examples of the ancient and Renaissance objects that served as his touchstones. Spanning the artist’s career, from his ambitious early history paintings to his moving late portrayals of individual heroes and heroines, the selection sheds light on an underexplored but vital element of his career. Rembrandt and the Ancients will be on view at The Met from November 7, 2027, through February 6, 2028.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
“As The Met's first major exhibition dedicated to Rembrandt's work in 20 years, Rembrandt and the Ancients offers new possibilities for understanding one of the world’s most iconic artists,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Uniting masterpieces from The Met collection with spectacular international loans, the exhibition brings together an unprecedented and powerful ensemble that reveals the depth of Rembrandt’s vision.”
Rembrandt’s career unfolded against the backdrop of flourishing interest in antiquity in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, especially in cosmopolitan Amsterdam, the site of growing collections of ancient art, a modern theater dedicated, in part, to the production of ancient dramas, and the publication of Dutch translations of numerous ancient texts. At the same time, the increasingly global reach of the Republic, along with developments in science and philosophy, gave rise to new knowledge and understandings of the world that both illuminated and challenged the ancients’ long-celebrated wisdom and achievements.
Within this dynamic cultural environment, Rembrandt produced an emphatically modern interpretation of antiquity, often deploying its themes and motifs to articulate ideas about his own time and place. Harnessing the distant past as a potent lens for the present, he produced highly distinctive imagery that is at once playful and poignant, irreverent and intense—and always supremely human. Rembrandt and the Ancients reveals the myriad ways that antiquity fueled some of this visionary artist’s boldest innovations.
In addition to masterworks from The Met’s own collection, such as the celebrated
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, the exhibition will present major international loans. Highlights include the spectacular
Abduction of Ganymede (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), a vivid and visceral manifestation of Rembrandt’s highly distinctive interpretation of antiquity.
Among the works coming to the United States for the first time are Rembrandt’s beautiful
Woman Bathing in a Stream (National Gallery, London); and poignant
Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter (Musée du Louvre, Paris), the latter to be shown together with the ancient Roman relief (Palazzo Altemps, Rome) and related graphic art on which it was based.
Also unprecedented is the first-ever loan to the United States of the monumental
Oath of the Batavians (Konstakademien / The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm), an extraordinary treatment of ancient Dutch history.
Additionally, the exhibition will assemble many rarely seen drawings, including all three of Rembrandt’s sensitive sketches of Roman busts (Albertina, Vienna; Royal Library of Turin; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), his playful rendering of
Diana and Actaeon (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden), and his dazzling depiction in red chalk of
Solomon’s Idolatry (Louvre). Following its presentation at The Met, the exhibition will travel to the Louvre, where it will be on view from March 22 through July 3, 2028.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, co-curator of the exhibition and Associate Curator in The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints, said: “Rembrandt’s engagement with antiquity took wide-ranging and extraordinarily, even wildly creative, forms. Although today this artist is so strongly associated with tradition—the consummate Old Master—his work was, in its moment, remarkably fresh—human, relatable, even raw in its naturalism and emotional immediacy. Never one to be satisfied with the expected, he deployed ancient themes to push boundaries—both artistic and social.”
Credits and Related Content
Rembrandt and the Ancients is curated by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, and Blaise Ducos, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Musée du Louvre.
A fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions by the exhibition’s curators and other leading scholars, will accompany the exhibition.
