ROTTERDAM.- Boijmans weighs anchor in the ‘Maritime’, where the two Rotterdam art collections come together in a new exhibition Maritime Masterpieces, the eleventh and final Boijmans Next Door show. Discover the unknown maritime world behind acclaimed works of art from Bosch to Van de Velde the Elder and other artists from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.

Star Works from Two Collections

The seventy or so works from six centuries of art in the brand-new exhibition Maritime Masterpieces, on view in the Maritime Museum Rotterdam tell the story of shipping and ports and of the people involved. The collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Maritime Museum Rotterdam are coming together to shed light on new connections. A combination of paintings, drawings, glasswork and ship models will blend with art history and maritime history. Old master works by Jheronimus Bosch, Ludolf Bakhuizen, Hendrik Avercamp, Jozef Israëls, Claude Monet and Paul Signac meet modern works by Guido van de Werve, Sasja Hagens and Dolf Henkes. Part of the exhibition consists of a collection of prints and a great many pen paintings by Willem van de Velde the Elder. The exhibition is the final event in the Boijmans Next Door project, which with the generous support of the Droom en Daad Foundation has kept the Boijmans collection in the public eye during the renovation and refurbishment of the museum building.

Surprising Collaboration

‘The combination of the two collections makes this exhibition unique,’ says Bert Boer, director of the Maritime Museum Rotterdam. ‘Six centuries of maritime art are coming together in the precise place – the Leuvehaven – where the port of Rotterdam was founded in the seventeenth century.’ One work that illustrates this particularly well is Paul Signac’s Port of Rotterdam from the Boijmans collection. He made this painting more than a hundred years ago, a stone’s throw away from the Leuvehaven and the Maritime Museum, where it can be seen from next February. Sjarel Ex, director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen added: ‘The combination of the Maritime and Boijmans is unusual because the two museums collect from different standpoints. Boijmans always buys seascapes based on their artistic quality; the Maritime collects on the basis of themes and from a historical viewpoint. The combination of the two will result in an astonishingly beautiful, unique exhibition.’

Boijmans Next Door

Boijmans Next Door is made possible by the Droom en Daad Foundation. This series of exhibitions, which started in 2019, involved a great collaborative effort between Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and eight neighbouring museums and institutions in Rotterdam. Thanks to this collaboration, some five hundred star works from the museum’s collection are appearing in a different light outside the museum during the major renovation and refurbishment works. As a result, new connections and encounters have been created between the collections at the host venues, where the stories and the context of the works are extended and explored in greater depth. This is the first time the Boijmans collection has been shown by so many Rotterdam institutions, with which Boijmans has been working for years. In the autumn of 2021, the museum’s collection of some 151,000 works of art will be housed in Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the first publicly accessible art depot in the world. The museum building is expected to reopen its doors in 2026.