Exhibition Light in the Darkness: 17th Century Dutch Painting in Croatian Collections [12 December 2024 – 9 March 2025]

Duration of the exhibition: 12 December 2024 – 9 March 2025, Klovićevi Dvori Gallery, Jezuitski trg 4, Zagreb

The exhibition “Light in the Darkness: 17th Century Dutch Painting in Croatian Collections” is the first in the new exhibition series at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery under the working title: “Golden Periods of European Art – Examples from Croatian Collections”. The preparatory work for the exhibition was conducted as part of the project Provenance Research on Artwork in Zagreb Collections (ZagArtColl_ProResearch), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. As a result, special attention in the organisation of the exhibition was dedicated not only to the latest insights into 17th-century Dutch painting but also to the theme of collecting and current research on the provenance of artworks in domestic collections.

The exhibition includes around a hundred paintings and prints, works of applied arts, and a reconstruction of a women’s costume composition, made according to the Portrait of an Elegant Lady from the Mimara Museum, at the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb. The reconstruction was created by Assoc. Prof. Irena Šabarić Škugor, Ph.D., and assistant Franka Karin, with the help of Prof. Katarina Nina Simončič, Ph.D. Graduate students of the Textile and Fashion Design programme, specialising in Costume Design, also participated in the project.

The works of visual arts created by Dutch masters in northern Europe during the 17th century that are now housed in contemporary Croatian public collections are concentrated in the northern part of the country. With the exception of individuals like Cardinal Juraj Haulik (1788–1869) and Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815–1905), who collected a limited number of Dutch master paintings during the 19th century, most of the paintings exhibited arrived in Croatia in the 20th century.

Although Bishop Strossmayer did not amass a large collection of Dutch paintings, his efforts in the second half of the 19th century and the opening of the Old Masters Gallery 140 years ago encouraged other donors to enrich the public gallery bearing his name. Thanks to subsequent enrichments of the collection through donations and acquisitions, Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters now holds the richest collection of 17th-century Dutch painting in Croatia, with around forty paintings. In addition to artworks being collected in museums, during the early decades of the 20th century, works by Dutch masters also found their way into private collections.

Almost a third of the artworks presented in this exhibition, donated by Ante Topić Mimara (1889–1987) to two Zagreb public collections, were imported from abroad. In the extensive collection, which grew during his lifetime to around four thousand artworks of all types, styles, and periods, several dozen Dutch paintings from the 17th century were included. The first donation, which included paintings in the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, was made in 1967, and the artworks were presented to the public at an exhibition organised in 1969. Several years later (1973), Topić made a second donation, based on which a larger portion of his collection was intended to establish a museum that would bear his name: the Mimara Museum. From the signing of this donation agreement to the museum’s opening in 1987, about fifteen years passed, and this exhibition marks the first opportunity to view Topić’s collection of Dutch masters or their imitators as a whole.

Another significant collection imported during this period, that of Bishop Đuro Kokša (1922–1998), arrived in Croatia as a complete set formed on foreign art markets. The first inventory of the collection was compiled by Đuro Vanđura, and among the hundred or so old masters, several paintings were attributed to Dutch and Flemish masters.

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The exhibition “Light in the Darkness: 17th Century Dutch Painting in Croatian Collections” provides an overview of Dutch painting, prints, and drawings in Croatian collections. Since many of the exhibited artworks are only rarely available to the public, such as in this exhibition, the extensive catalogue, in which these works are thoroughly addressed through one hundred and eight catalogue entries, will greatly contribute to the understanding of this corpus of Baroque art in Croatia.

Exhibition author: Ivan Ferenčak, Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts    
Exhibition curator: Valentina Bach, Klovićevi Dvori Gallery