ABN AMRO Bank presents
Dutch Days Museum Seminar
"Masters of the Golden Age"
Organized by Asia Week Hong Kong
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Title Sponsor
Hotel Sponsor
Tuesday, 5 April 2016 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm | Hong Kong Arts Centre, agnès b. CINEMA Mauritshuis Museum - Rebuilding the Mauritshuis by Emilie Gordenker
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6pm registration, 6:30pm lecture
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The Mauritshuis is an extraordinary museum that combines a small but outstanding collection of Dutch paintings of the Golden Age with the spectacular setting of a seventeenth-century residence situated in the heart of The Hague. The Mauritshuis is perhaps best known as the home of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, but contains many other treasures as well. The museum reopened in June 2014 after an extensive renovation and expansion. This lecture offers a brief outline of the history of the collection and the building in which it is displayed, reveals the secrets behind the building project, and sets out the museum’s ambitious plans for the future.
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Conversation with the Speaker and Maria Mok, Hong Kong Museum of Art ​
After the lecture, Maria Mok, curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art will join the speaker for a conversation and Q&A with members of the audience. ​
Dr. Emilie E.S. Gordenker is an art historian with a doctorate in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has been director of the Mauritshuis since 2008.
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Wednesday, 6 April 2015 | 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm | Hong Kong Arts Centre, agnès b. CINEMA
Where would Delft be without the VOC (East India Company)?
The history of Dutch ceramics from 1600 through 1850 by Robert Aronson
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6pm registration, 6:30pm lecture
This lecture tells extensively the story of Dutch delftware, especially of the historical context in which delftware could bloom. The discussion will address not only the 16th- and 17th-century majolica, but also the improvements in technique that made the realisation of a new Dutch faience possible. Well-skilled potters from Antwerp and other places brought with them the technical qualities of faience-making to the northern parts of Europe. Aronson shall discuss the di erences between majolica and faience, and remarkable role father and son Verstraeten in Haarlem have played in the development of delftware shall be mentioned.
Robert D. Aronson, fifth generation owner of the family company Aronson Antiquairs celebrates in 2015 his twenty-fifth anniversary in antiques. Spreading knowledge to a larger audience by means of lectures has become an important part of his business. By now, Robert has lectured in prominent museums all over the world, for example San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong and Melbourne Australia.
Saturday, 9 April, 2016 | 3 pm - 4 pm | Liang Yi Museum
The Rijksmuseum Treasure-House of the Netherlands: The Rijksmuseum as National Showcase of Dutch Golden Age Painting by Duncan Bull
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2:30pm registration, 3pm lecture​
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The concept of “Dutch Golden Age” is a relatively modern phenomenon, one that only arose during the later nineteenth century and which was largely fostered by the opening of the Rijksmuseum’s magnificent new building in 1885. There, pride of place was given, as it still is today, to Rembrandt’s van Rijn’s great Night Watch, one of the most powerful pictorial statements of secular civic pride ever to have flowed from brush of a painter. If Rembrandt stood central in the vision of the Rijksmuseum’s foundation and mission, other artists that the Museum profiled came to predominate in the public perception of Dutch art: the calm and measured domestic scenes of Vermeer and De Hooch; the “romantic” landscapes of Ruisdael and Hobbema; the atmospheric church interiors of Saenredam, the perfectly arranged still-lifes of De Heem and Weenix; and the broadly-brushed bravura portraits of Frans Hals.
Throughout its two-hundred year history, the Rijksmuseum has striven not only to collect and to present its public with a representative collection of Dutch Golden-Age painting, but also to acquire as many of the greatest masterpieces by the greatest Dutch painters as it can. This lecture traces the growth of that collection amidst the changes of taste that increasingly saw the Dutch school of painting take it place in public perception among the very greatest European cultural achievements.