Not Too Late to Catch Jan Lievens’s Exhibition in Milwaukee

It is not too late for Chicagoans to catch Jan Lievens’s exhibition in Milwaukee, which ends on April 26, 2009. The exhibition will then begin in May, 2009, in Rembrandthius in Amsterdam and will run through August, 2009, at that location. It is well worth the drive to have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit Jan Lievens’s last U.S. exhibit to see his amazing original paintings that have been brought “out of Rembrandt’s shadow” and into a glory all their own.
Painter and draftsman Jan Lievens (1607-1674) was born in Leiden, The Netherlands. At eight years of age, he was apprenticed to a local Dutch painter and then to the Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman (1583-1633).

It took some time for my friends and me to schedule a day to travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum to visit one of the three shows attributed to this brilliant Dutch artist, Jan Lievens. While the first exhibit took place in fall of 2008 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the second exhibit will continue in Milwaukee until the end of April, 2009, and the other take place in the Rembrandthius in Amsterdam from May to August, 2009.

The memorable exhibition, “Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered” is the first comprehensive set of exhibitions to honor this artist since his death in 1669, and we are fortunate to have two of these exhibits occurring in the U.S., particularly less than an hour’s drive from Chicago. The last exhibition of his work was in Europe in 1979 and was subtitled “A Painter in the Shadow of Rembrandt.”

This exhibition presents forty-five of the artist’s paintings, several of which are newly discovered. In the past, nine of the displayed paintings were credited to Rembrandt (1606 –1669) between the seventeenth century and modern times, including “Saint Paul,” “The Feast of Esther,” “Still Life with Books,” “Portrait Head of an Old Woman” (a.k.a. “Rembrandt's Mother”), “The Penitent Magdalene,” “Preciosa and Doòa Clara,” “Bathsheba Receiving King David's Letter,” “Raising of Lazarus,” and “Gideon's Sacrifice.”
© Rachel Madorsky