Exhibition Trailer: Rembrandt’s Orient

Rembrandt and his Dutch contemporaries were fascinated by the distant lands from which a great number of novel goods were imported beginning in the seventeenth century. The enthusiasm for things foreign became fashionable and resulted in a new type of art that combined painted realism with idealized images and fantastical projections. The “Orient” was a construct of props, stereotypes, and imagination. The exhibition examines how foreign lands were depicted at that time–a “meeting” of East and West that was closely linked to Rembrandt’s work.