Prints from Leiden University on display in Museum Bredius
The exhibition Between the Lines will open to the public from April 25th at Museum Bredius in The Hague. As a result of a project by Yvonne Bleyerveld, senior curator of drawings and printmaking at the RKD and endowed professor Art on Paper in Leiden University, the museum will exhibit several seventeenth century prints from the university’s collection.
Recurring scenes
Museum Bredius will host 21 Netherlandish prints made between 1580 and 1700 from Leiden University’s collection. The motifs shown in the prints are also present in the museum’s paintings, such as a woman baking pancakes, music-making groups, cheerful drinkers, quacks, and mythological figures, but the iconography and stories depicted have a deeper meaning that can go unnoticed at first glance. They require a closer look Between the Lines. For the prints, the lines are quite literal, as they are made of black ink lines on paper.
Made by students
The exhibition Between the Lines: Prints from Leiden University in Museum Bredius has been curated by a group of international students from the Arts and Culture MA, led by Professor Yvonne Bleyerveld. During her ‘Art on Paper’ course, each participant chose a painting from Museum Bredius and two prints from Leiden University’s collection. The aim was to search for connections, visual traditions and meanings in Dutch paintings and prints from the period 1580-1700. The students wrote the accompanying exhibition texts themselves, an excellent exercise for these aspiring art historians.
Leiden University owns more than 100,000 prints and 12,000 drawings, a collection that has been brought together over a period of two hundred years. For students, works from the collection are inspiring sources of research. The exhibition Between the Lines: Prints from Leiden University in Museum Bredius can be seen from 25 April to 30 June 2024, in Museum Bredius in The Hague.
