Elmer Kolfin presents “Out of the shadow and into the light: Black figures in the art of Rembrandt’s time”

All major Dutch collections have paintings representing Black figures and the Bader Collection at Agnes is no exception. For a long time, Black presence in Dutch seventeenth-century art went unaccounted for and scholarship around this was thus absent in academic texts and museum exhibitions. However, research of the past thirty years has drawn increased attention to the ubiquitous presence and varying roles of Black figures in Dutch art. In this lecture, Dr Elmer Kolfin examines why Black figures recur so frequently in Dutch art, and whether and why Rembrandt’s approach differed from that of his contemporaries.