The exhibition in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart focuses on around 80 Flemish and Dutch paintings from the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION, which constitute the core of this collection in terms of scope and rank. The collection's diversity of subject matter is outstanding, ranging from history paintings to portraits, landscapes, genre paintings, and still lifes. Like hardly any other private collection built up in recent times, the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION demonstrates the thematic and stylistic diversity of Dutch painting in its heyday.
Dutch regions and their artistic representatives
Antwerp, as the artistic center of the southern Netherlands, is present with outstanding works by the most important Flemish protagonists, such as Joos de Momper the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder, Frans Francken the Younger and Hans Jordaens III, as well as Jan Brueghel the Younger and Henrick van Balen. Paintings by Jacob Jordaens and other students and collaborators of Peter Paul Rubens reflect his far-reaching artistic influence. By himself, the collection possesses a little-known "Portrait of a Capuchin Monk."
In contrast to the south, with Antwerp as the leading metropolis, the art scene in the northern provinces had a decentralized structure. Utrecht, for example, developed into a stronghold of Caravaggio work. Among its founders were Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst.
Haarlem made a name for itself above all in the field of landscape painting, whose multifaceted development from the intimate Dutch "national landscape" of Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael to its ideal exaggeration in Jacob van Ruisdael's waterfall painting is exemplarily documented. Bravura pieces by Gerard Dou as well as Frans and Willem Mieris represent Leiden's leading role in the field of fine painting.
Highlights of the still life painting cultivated in all school centers are the ceremonial and banquet still lifes of Abraham Beyeren and Pieter Claesz. Among the numerically small group of portraits, Aelbert Cuyp's portrait of a child and the full-length portrait by Gerard ter Borch set brilliant accents.
The HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION
The genesis of the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION dates back to the 1970s. Named after the former family residence of the collectors (Hohenbuchau Castle Park), it comprises an important collection of Dutch Baroque paintings. The selection and shaping of the collection is due to the connoisseurship and flair of the collection's founders, Otto Christian Faßbender and his wife Renate.
Complementing the focus and spectrum of the collection, the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION also includes a limited but select number of works from the German, Spanish and Italian schools.
Over the past 20 years, paintings from the collection have been on display in special exhibitions in many countries around the world. Since December 2007, the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION has been on permanent loan under the administration of the Princely Collections, Vienna. In 2011, the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna showed the entire collection for the first time in a comprehensive exhibition. Furthermore, paintings from the HOHENBUCHAU COLLECTION are included in the permanent gallery hanging of the Garden Palace Liechtenstein with its top-class holdings from the collections of the Prince von und zu Liechtenstein on a permanent rotating basis.
A complete catalog in German and English, written by Peter Sutton, has been published to accompany the exhibition.