At New York's Met, "Rembrandt and the Ancients" Is Set for November 2027

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced "Rembrandt and the Ancients," a show organized with the Louvre that opens in New York in November 2027. According to ARTnews and Hyperallergic, it is billed as the first in-depth museum look at Rembrandt's engagement with the art and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean, including Greco-Roman and biblical subjects. It will be the Met's first major Rembrandt exhibition in roughly 20 years, and after its New York run it travels to the Louvre in Paris.

More than 120 paintings, prints, and drawings are coming from over 40 institutions. The Met is lending four paintings, three drawings, and 11 prints from its own holdings, among them "Aristotle With a Bust of Homer," which has not been loaned in more than 56 years. The Louvre contributes two paintings and two drawings.

At least three paintings will be seen in the United States for the first time: "Bathsheba Holding King David's Letter" (1654) from the Louvre, the monumental "Oath of the Batavians" (ca. 1661) from the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, and "Woman Bathing in a Stream." The Bathsheba is to hang beside an ancient relief lent by the National Roman Museum, which Rembrandt reportedly knew through a reproduction. "Oath of the Batavians," officially titled "The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis," illustrates an episode from Tacitus's Histories, in which a one-eyed chieftain swears his people to revolt against Rome in 69–70 CE.

Hyperallergic sets the context: Rembrandt worked during a boom in antiquities collecting in the Dutch Golden Age. Collectors such as the Reijnst brothers, Johannes Smetius, and Franciscus Junius amassed ancient artifacts and texts, while the printing press spread classical and scientific writings in Dutch translation. The show also includes historic reference materials alongside Rembrandt's own work.

The curators are Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, the Met's curator of European drawings and prints, and Blaise Ducos, who oversees Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Louvre. Seidenstein says Rembrandt, now seen as the consummate Old Master, was strikingly fresh in his own time, using ancient themes to push artistic and social boundaries.

The Met is at 1000 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.

(Details are drawn from points that agree across reports by ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Finestre sull'Arte.)