“See the largest selection of Rembrandt paintings assembled in the United States. . . . Ever.” Such ads helped make Rembrandt in America one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In its last days, demand was so high that an aggressive scalper tried to sell his extra ticket to a senior administrator as she returned from lunch. The show’s success was all the more remarkable given its genesis: curatorial conversations about the links between collecting and connoisseurship. With those links as its defining concept, Rembrandt in America, curated by George S. Keyes, Tom Rassieur, Dennis P. Weller, and Jon L. Seydl, had the potential to become an exhibition for specialists. Connoisseurship has long been an issue in Rembrandt studies, with the scope of Rembrandt’s oeuvre sparking countless debates. Collecting history has likewise engaged generations of scholars. The brilliance of this exhibition was that it let the public into these scholarly conversations in such an accessible way.

Although Rembrandt self-identified primarily as a history painter, a survey of acquisitions since the Gilded Age reveals that Americans have tended to purchase his portraits and portrait-like compositions. The relative availability of portraits, along with their psychological complexity and real-life vividness, made this genre highly appealing to American collectors. Of the forty-eight paintings chosen for the Minneapolis venue, only five depicted historical narratives, and a further six rendered historical figures in a portrait-like manner, using all the skills Rembrandt had accrued painting faces. An example of the latter, Rembrandt’s Lucretia (1666) from the Minneapolis Institute’s own collection, was appropriately accorded a place of honor in the final room of the five-room exhibition. Rembrandt positioned Lucretia, the tragic Roman heroine, facing outward, her white chemise subtly stained with blood from a self-inflicted knife wound. With her left hand, she pulls a cord to call relatives or to close a bed-curtain, in a gesture that stabilizes both the person and the composition. The portrait-like face above her starkly formal body conveys a poignant, complex consciousness that fully expresses the moment yet transcends it, making this one of the most moving works in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. Hanging in an adjacent space, his magnificent late Self Portrait (1659) from the National Gallery, Washington, shared pride of place with Lucretia. These crowning achievements were joined by several other strong, late works in this last room.

In contrast with the two other venues for this exhibition (Raleigh and Cleveland), Minneapolis chose to present all of the paintings of Rembrandt in America in roughly chronological order. This curatorial decision succeeded in leading the viewer toward both a logical and an emotional culmination. The first room was devoted to Rembrandt’s Leiden years; the remaining four to his Amsterdam period. This layout provided stylistic context, encouraging viewers to make comparisons between secure Rembrandts and those with less secure attributions, all from relatively the same period in each room. That first room, from his Leiden period, was so full of panels attributed to artists other than Rembrandt that one visitor asked why he had traveled all the way to Minneapolis to see a show of non-Rembrandts. Yet this very room displayed the exhibition’s most successful pairing of a secure Rembrandt tronie, or character study, with a workshop tronie: Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-trimmed Cloak (1632) next to a portrait (1632) from Rembrandt’s studio. The latter, probably by an assistant modeled on the prototype, shows a similar young, strawberry blonde in oval format. But while Rembrandt’s is enlivened by a play of back lighting against shifting, frontally directional light, minutely varied brushwork, and subtle tensions of head and body positioning, the other figure is flatly illuminated, thinly painted, and silhouetted against a plain black background. This juxtaposition encouraged non-specialist museum visitors to develop a connoisseur’s eye and then try out their new skill on other works in the show.

Rembrandt’s output was large; his studio’s output—students imitating the master’s manner and assistants helping to execute works, especially portraits—was huge. In addition, his success led to a raft of imitators and copiers. Connoisseurship to establish the boundaries of Rembrandt’s oeuvre became an issue as early as the seventeenth century, and not just for scholars. By the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, however, connoisseurship was hardly the first order of the day. A craze for Rembrandt paintings among wealthy collectors, combined with the founding of American public museums eager for Old Masters, spurred a veritable frenzy of collecting on this side of the Atlantic, prompting purchases of many pictures of dubious quality. Competition for his work led unscrupulous dealers to pass off copies and even forgeries as genuine. In 1923, one skeptical scholar observed that of the approximately six hundred paintings he estimated Rembrandt to have executed, two thousand of them resided in American collections (C. Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004, 183). The joke was supported a few years later (with better numbers) by the publication of 175 entries in Wilhelm Valentiner’s book, Rembrandt Paintings in America (1931). Worse, only a third of the paintings Valentiner had considered autograph are accepted today.

In the Minneapolis exhibition, the ratio of confidently ascribed to shakier Rembrandts was thus relatively favorable, with twenty-seven considered secure attributions and twenty-one specified as workshop, circle of, follower of, imitator of, or attributed to. In the last category were works now attributed, with better justification, to Jan Lievens (Rembrandt’s early associate), as well to Govaert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Isaac de Joudreville (Rembrandt’s students). To complicate matters, many of these not-quite-secure works bear signatures either sanctioned by Rembrandt or falsely added. Although a number of rather wooden, heavy-handed paintings made one wonder about their inclusion in the show—for example, an inept follower’s muddled picture probably depicting The Death of Lucretia (mid-1640s)—the labels presented them as puzzles for would-be connoisseurs. By the time visitors reached the portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (presumably) in the middle of the exhibition, they might have been expected to see its weaknesses, despite the lovely sitter’s appeal. One of the excellent didactic wall panels justified the sheer number of non-Rembrandts by the curators’ desire to offer as many comparisons as possible.

In keeping with the exhibition’s overarching concept, most labels also discussed the links between collecting and connoisseurship. Many of them concluded with a paragraph on provenance. Here again, visitors were encouraged to become active viewers and thinkers, as bits of biographical information about past owners allowed them to reach their own conclusions about money’s effect on attributions as well as on collecting. Even those with less enthusiasm for such a deliberately uneven array of pictures could relish a certain schadenfreude in learning that the oeuvre’s downsizing eliminated prized “Rembrandts” from many mansion walls. At the other extreme, Minnesotans must have been gratified to see the validation of Minneapolis newspaper publisher Herschel V. Jones’s discriminating eye; his Lucretia (sold to the museum in 1934) represented the show’s high point.

Other gems in the exhibition included one of the earliest of Rembrandt’s portraits, Martin Looten (1632), donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by J. Paul Getty; the Old Man with a Gold Chain (ca. 1631), which the label perceptively termed Rembrandt’s “calling card” upon his arrival in Amsterdam; the impressive full-length portraits of the Reverend Johannes Elison and his wife, Maria Bockenolle (1634); two late, portrait-like renderings of St. Bartholomew (1657, 1661), vivid confirmations of Rembrandt’s tendency to revisit themes; and the unusual tronie (ca. 1640) of an elderly woman with a prominent stay fixing her cap. Although the exquisite Philemon and Baucis (1658) certainly formed a welcome addition to the History Paintings room, such histories as Raising of Lazarus (1630–31) and Visitation (1640) were keenly missed, all the more so because images of both appear in the catalogue.

For those in search of a fuller understanding of Rembrandt’s interests and development, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts provided a supplementary exhibition of Rembrandt prints from its and other Minnesota collections (Rembrandt’s Miniature World [June 24–September 16, 2012]). Many of these etchings had been given to the museum by Jones, whose collecting had actually focused more on prints and books than on paintings. The comprehensive and coherent nature of this secondary exhibition showed that when it came to prints American collectors succeeded in assembling works that reflected the breadth of Rembrandt’s oeuvre.

The Rembrandt in America catalogue opens with Weller’s overview of the collecting and exhibiting of Rembrandt paintings in this country. This is amplified by Keyes’s more detailed essay on collecting history, with information about such early patrons as Henry Clay Frick, Charles Yerkes, Andrew Mellon, and Peter A. B. Widener (with some fascinating tidbits about the latter’s swindling by dealer Leo Nardus). Keyes’s second essay, “The Elusive Nature of Portraiture,” argues persuasively for the influence of Rembrandt’s Leiden tronies on the expressiveness of his Amsterdam portraits. Rassieur contributes both an insightful discussion of Rembrandt’s style and studio and an essay on his Leiden years, discussing the changing attributions of specific paintings in the exhibition. Weller’s essay on Rembrandt’s history paintings is enlivened by wry comments concerning some of the weaker pictures that Americans chose to collect. Entries for each of the exhibited paintings are limited to lists of basic data; their images, though handsome, are not well coordinated with the essays, so that it can be frustrating to tease out all the information on any specific work. Nevertheless, these essays are valuable both to scholar and non-specialist for their expansion of what could only be presented in summary form on the wall labels.

The curators of Rembrandt in America turned what might have been a specialist’s examination into a blockbuster exhibition. Admirably expecting more than raves from dazzled museum-goers, the show dared to engage them with real issues of provenance and connoisseurship. Most visitors seemed willing to take the dare. Even when word got out—“Half those Rembrandts aren’t by Rembrandt!”—the public kept coming. Of course this resolutely didactic show offered a payoff you cannot get in most lecture halls: that final room, those genuine masterpieces, any collector could wish for.