Northern Exposure: Painting from the Low Countries in the Permanent Collection

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters invested great care in the technical concerns of luminosity, clarity, reflection, and shadow, producing paintings where light and its diverse forms take center stage. The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum holds a rich group of works that demonstrate these interests and the astonishing range of lighting effects that these painters achieved. The variety of paintings in the collection also points to the region’s shifting social, religious, and economic conditions during the seventeenth century. What we can—and cannot—see in these paintings evidences many of these changes, prompting conversations about the legacies of the seventeenth century that are still with us today.

This exhibition is made possible by the Susan B. Weatherbie Exhibition Fund.