In the Curator’s Words: San Diego Museum of Art showcases Dutch paintings

by Michael James Rocha

Isaak Koedijk's "The Barber Surgeon," painted in 1649-1650, is one of numerous paintings on display at the San Diego Museum of Art as part of the "Dutch Painting: Special Loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" exhibit.(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

In the Curator’s Words is an occasional series that takes a critical look at current exhibitions through the eyes of curators.

It was an opportunity Michael Brown, curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum of Art, just couldn’t pass up.

Numerous SDMA European paintings would be leaving for an exhibition in Japan, so he knew a large chunk of the museum’s space in Balboa Park would be available.

Brown talks about “Dutch Painting: Special Loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” and how the exhibition, on display through March 2027, came to be.

Q: How lucky we are to be able to see these works in San Diego. How did this partnership come about with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston?

A: We are lucky, to be sure. SDMA curators have built on a number of collaborations with MFA Boston in recent years, most notably with “O’Keeffe and Moore” in 2024. We had the ideal gallery — the centerpiece of the second floor of the museum’s original 1926 building — available for this special presentation. So, from a curatorial point of view, it was also very good timing.

When my colleague, MFA Boston curator Frederick Ilchman, and I realized that San Diego’s core collection of European paintings would be touring Japan at the same time as Boston’s highly acclaimed exhibition “Dutch Art in a Global Age” traveled the U.S., we saw it immediately as an opportunity for a meaningful collaboration. With 10 carefully selected Dutch paintings from Boston, our visitors would be able to enjoy an entire gallery exploring Dutch art. In turn, we agreed to lend several important Spanish paintings to a future exhibition at MFA Boston.

Q: Why are these works so important for us to study and admire in 2025?

A: In the history of Western art and culture, we’re struck by a few key moments: Ancient Greece and Rome, the Italian Renaissance or Spain’s Golden Age. Four hundred years ago, something similar happened in the Netherlands, the tiny Northern European nation that gave rise to both Rembrandt the artist and the Dutch East India Company (by far the largest and most profitable employer in the world at the time, bigger than Amazon and Apple combined). Economically and socially liberal, though marred by colonial exploitation, Dutch society flourished. So did learning and science. Innovating with technical advances and styles approaching photo-realism — sometimes aided by optical lenses — highly skilled painters found great success. The paintings in this exhibition were commissioned by regular folk, not kings or popes, enjoyed in fairly modest domestic settings. Many paintings feature clear moral messages taught through humor and symbolism, many beginning with the basic reminder that life is short. The paintings’ messages hold true today.

Q: If a viewer were new to Dutch paintings, are there common traits among them that we should look for?

A: In this historic setting, I wanted to surround the 10 exquisite paintings from Boston with a supporting cast drawn from SDMA’s superb collection of Dutch engravings. The radiant color and lustrous depth of the oil paintings — often on smooth wood panels — contrasts vividly with the drawn lines of the works on paper. Likewise, a selection of antique blue-and-white ceramics reinforces how images of flowers, landscapes and portraiture were constant themes across varied media at the time.

Observation of the natural world was key to Dutch painting, whether in still-life, landscape or portraiture. Paintings were often slightly improved but still realistic versions of the world. The paintings reward close looking, and maybe a certain degree of introspection. Likewise, the attention to detail — and lots of it! — was intended to delight and astound the viewer. Visitors are sure to see something new each time they come back.