Children's birthdays can be important moments even in the lives of adults. The party, the presents, the treats can give a child an unforgettable radiant glow. But a birthday has its melancholy side as well, reminding parents how much older they are than their growing children.

This year the city of Vancouver turns one hundred. There are not more than a hardy handful in the old age homes of the Netherlands who can say the same. On the other hand, the average age of Dutch cities is between 700 and 750 years; and they will be forgiven if they smile a bit patronizingly at all the excitement in Vancouver.

The birthday present that Vancouver chose for itself – an exhibition covering three centuries of Dutch painting – is simple enough at first glance, an expression of the youthful boldness and justifiable ambition that characterize this important city and its splendid museum.

When I say that the exhibition is simple at first glance, I am thinking of the riches of the Dutch collections from which it is drawn. The English art historian Christopher Wright, in his publication Paintings in Dutch museums, listed some thirty thousand paintings by about three-and-a-half thousand masters in three hundred and fifty institutional collections. The total includes non-Dutch paintings, but far fewer than one might think. For all its international orientation, the Netherlands has never been seriously interested in collecting the art of other nations.

With such a vast number of paintings to choose from, it surely cannot have been difficult to treat Vancouver to an exhibition of a mere hundred works. A second glance, however, shows us how misleading this impression is. Organizing an exhibition of old art involves a lot more than taking a number of canvases from museum galleries and storerooms and loading them into a plane. It is a careful process of weighing the relative merits of all those works against each other, in search of the combination of artists and subjects which best illustrates the chosen theme. That is one of the differences between 1886 and 1986: the discipline of art history, which is not much older than the city of Vancouver, has not stood still in the intervening century.

At the risk of oversimplifying history, I think it can be said that a hundred years ago it dawned on us how few works by certain old Dutch masters were left in the Netherlands. Within the limits of the possible, we began to buy back Dutch paintings from abroad. At the same time, we began to comb the archives for accurate information concerning our old masters, who were only known from romanticized biographies. The researchers of the late nineteenth century set out to find facts that could help them to distinguish the work of one artist from that of another.

Guided by their aesthetic preferences, they devoted most of their attention initially to the great names: Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, Paulus Potter, Jan Steen. As research continued into our century, the names of many less familiar figures could be added to this honour roll, while the number of works assigned to the great masters was pared down by increasingly critical connoisseurs.

That is only one of the issues involved. Concurrently, twentieth-century scholars began to grow interested in other sides of art than the aesthetic one. They realized that the surrounding culture also affected the nature and style of a finished work. The implicit notion that a painting was a portrayal of reality – however you define it – began to lose ground. This insight had particularly far-reaching consequences for the study of Dutch art, which had always been seen as the most realistic school of all. Suddenly we were made aware of the moralizing, allegorical and symbolic meanings that could be concealed in a seemingly realistic representation.

Art history marches on. Gary Schwartz is a member of a new generation – not even such a young one, at that – which has brought yet other insights to bear on the same body of works. The present exhibition and catalogue are one of the first results of his approach, which he explains in the introduction. To assemble a survey of Dutch painting by the norms not of 1886 or 1936 but of 1986 was however only part of the challenge. We also wanted our bouquet to represent the entire artistic flora of Holland, while being harmonious and fragrant. I hope you will think we have succeeded.

It is my pleasant duty to express my thanks to Michael Francis, co-chairman of the Centennial Commission, and to my colleague Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, for their confidence in this venture. While it is true that they approached the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts rather late in the day for a project of this magnitude, they bore up well under the uncertainties they had to endure from our side.

Old art should be as fresh and new as contemporary art. If it stops surprising us, it ceases to be art. Should The Dutch world of painting live up to this criterion, we can say that the youthful centenarian Vancouver has chosen the right present.

Robert de Haas
Director
The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts