Exhibition of the week: Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker

Exhibition of the week

Reclaimed: Paintings From the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker

Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn.

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Through Sept. 7

Jacques Goudstikker’s life was dedicated to high culture, but his death was “a savage joke,” said Matthew Gurewitsch in The Wall Street Journal. On May 13, 1940, the renowned Dutch art dealer fled the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, along with his wife and infant son. Two days later he fell on the deck of a ship, off the shore of England, and died. Goudstikker left behind a remarkable collection of 1,400 Renaissance masterpieces, and the trove was soon seized by the Nazis. “Hitler’s rapacious second-in-command,” Hermann Göring, took many works for his own collection. After the war, Allied forces were able to recover only a fraction of those, which were repatriated to the Netherlands with the understanding that they would be returned to Goudstikker’s heirs.

“They were not,” said Maureen Mullarkey in The New York Sun. In fact, the Netherlands compounded the original injustice by adding 200 of Goudstikker’s paintings to its national collections. Only a protracted court battle restored these works to Goudstikker’s heirs, who now plan to sell them at auction. Thus this gathering of 40 pieces is the last, best chance to see Goudstikker’s paintings in one place. The “spectacular collection” is a grab bag of masterpieces, incorporating important works in various eras and styles. Daniel Vosmaer’s panoramic View of Delft (1663) is one of the earliest Renaissance cityscapes. Jan Mostaert’s Landscape With an Episode From the Conquest of America or Discovery of America (c. 1520–40) “is famed as the earliest painted representation of the New World.”

Besides landscapes, Goudstikker had an eye for “richly textured portraits and psychologically taut history paintings,” said Georgette Gouveia in the Westchester, N.Y, Journal News. Paintings of biblical and mythical topics, in particular, bristle with hidden implications. Pieter Lastman’s David Gives Uriah a Letter for Joab (1619), for instance, shines with “psychological subtlety” when you consider that the Hebrew king is handing the servant his own death sentence. But one painting stands out “as first among equals”: Jan Steen’s 1671 oil The Sacrifice of Iphigenia. This image of the brave Greek princess—doomed to die so the Greeks might be victorious at war—well symbolizes “all those who responded to the Nazis with a heroic, existential stance.”