Caesar van Everdingen - Sinebrychoff Art Museum

Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt

Caesar van Everdingen created handsome portraits of the bourgeoisie along with stunning historical scenes and sensuous representations of mythological scenes. He used his exceptional flair with the brush to conjure the softness of velvet, the sheen of fine furs and the gleam of expensive dress fabrics onto his canvases.

Caesar van Everdingen (1616/1617–1678) from the Dutch city of Alkmaar was, in his own time, a highly regarded virtuoso painter and grand master of Dutch classicism. However, he would later become overshadowed by his contemporary Rembrandt, along with many other 17th century Dutch painters. Caesar van Everdingen has now been rediscovered as an outstanding painter of his time, and his oeuvre, considered by experts to be one of the finest from the era, is undergoing a re-evaluation.

Caesar van Everdingen’s first ever monographic exhibition was launched in Alkmaar’s Stedelijk Museum in September 2016, four hundred years after the artist’s birth. The exhibition marked the culmination of many years of research and conservation, and represented a significant event for the Dutch art scene. The exhibition presents 28 paintings, half of the artist’s known output. Its pièce de résistance is a stunning, large-scale civic guard group portrait sized at 201 x 350 cm depicting bourgeois members of Alkmaar society.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum in Alkmaar.