Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait With Shaded Eyes” is one of several works on display at the Norton through March 2026.
Picture a darkly-lit hall, its plum-colored walls lined with dozens of paintings, all masterpieces from the Dutch Golden Age — Rembrandt, Hals, even a Vermeer, almost all framed in thick, black wood. This room exists, not in Amsterdam or Paris or even New York, but in West Palm Beach, where the Norton Museum of Art has mounted an absolutely staggering exhibition dedicated to this pivotal era in art history.
“Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from the Leiden Collection” is notable for several reasons. For starters, this is the first time Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the rest of the artists in the show have ever been exhibited in South Florida. Then there’s the fact that the paintings are all owned by the Leiden Collection, the largest cache of Dutch Golden Age art held in private hands, and that this is the first time it’s been shown in North America, let alone Florida…