Dear Annabelle, Mr Kaplan, all my fellow guests here at the Hermitage Amsterdam,
Mr. Kaplan, thank you for bringing this special collection to Amsterdam and for your beautiful words. You can imagine that when I saw the invitation I thought ‘Why don’t they ask the Mayor of Leiden to come’?
It is really gutsy to call it the The Leiden Collection Mr. Kaplan.
With your knowledge of Dutch history, I’m sure you know that this country’s identity is based, to a large extent, on petty rivalries between different cities.
I have learned that the current Mayor of Leiden, when discussing Rembrandt, always mentions that after the master moved to Amsterdam his life started to go south – he was getting into more and more financial trouble and often quarrelled with the patrons who commissioned his work.
Of course, these days The Mayor of Leiden and I are both joking when we talk about this so-called rivalry.
But it was no joke in the year 1631, when Rembrandt moved from a Leiden ruled by staunch Calvinists to an Amsterdam ruled by ambitious merchants who didn’t want religious strife to get in the way of their business. It must have been like moving to another country.
Imagine the city Rembrandt arrived in that year. The historian Simon Schama writes magnificently in his book Rembrandt’s Eyes about how the orthodox preachers of the painter’s hometown would describe Amsterdam:
Let me quote a few lines:
Papists and Jews, Remonstrants and Lutherans were not the only voices over which the [preachers] struggled to make themselves heard. […] And now that man of notorious laxity were governing the city, who knew what kind of ungodly theatricals they might tolerate next? Women […] were known to recite poetry and sing before admiring circles of dilettantes […]
Out in the markets Amsterdam threatened to turn the New Jerusalem into the New Babel. Portuegese, Italian, Polish, German […] Swedish, Trukish, Spanish […] greetings, complaints, inquiries, barters, insults, felicitations, the cries of street vendors; the bellowing of actors and storytellers, the solemn assurances of quacks; the shrieks of clowns […]
It was not a quiet city.
But definitely an endless source of inspiration for a brilliant painter, and for anyone eager to know what the world has to offer or who just loves a vibrant city.
And Amsterdam wants to be just that. A magnet for birds of paradise, people chasing their dreams, and art lovers. For the latter, we sometimes also need a little bit of peace and quiet. Rembrandt lived just a few hundred metres away from where we are this evening, and he probably saw this beautiful building being constructed in 1638, when it was built as a rest home for women.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I think Rembrandt would have liked seeing his works here.
Works that, I believe had a special place in his heart.
Such as Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and the small and moving Bust of a bearded old man.
This exhibition is wonderful news for all lovers of the Dutch Masters, it is very valuable for the future of this museum, and it is a gift to the city of Amsterdam.
It is my great honour to now declare the exhibition open.
Thank you.