From Dutch to duckface selfies

Museum in The Hague to show self-portraits by master artists from 17th-century Golden Age

AMSTERDAM: The selfie may be a contemporary look, but a Dutch museum aims to show that its roots go back centuries. In an upcoming exhibition, the Mauritshuis in The Hague is showing a collection of self-portraits by master artists, including Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Carel Fabritius and Gerrit Dou from Dutch painting’s 17th-century Golden Age.

The self-portrait was particularly popular among Dutch painters of the period. Rembrandt alone painted and drew dozens over his lifetime, tracing the aging of a brash and self-confident young genius into a bowed and disappointed bankrupt.

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The exhibition, ‘Dutch Self-Portraits — Selfies from the Golden Age’, will gather 27, mostly loaned, paintings that show the ways artists chose to represent themselves —  as wealthy bourgeois, family men, hunters or professional painters.

While anybody with a smartphone can make a selfie nowadays, back then, the self-portrait was the preserve of the highly-skilled, the museum said in a statement on Thursday. “But one thing remained unchanged: the fact that the creators of a self-portrait must choose how they want to present themselves,” it said.

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The same goes for all self-portraits, from Boschaert’s possessive glance as he clutches his pallet and brushes in his 1630s ‘Self-Portrait’ to today’s duckface in the restaurant. The exhibition opens on October 8 in the Mauritshuis, home to one of the world’s most important collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings, including Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. It runs until January 3. 

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th,  2015.

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