DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY.-The museum kunst palast presents Neighborhoods: the Netherlands and Flanders - A Celebration of Painting - Dutch and Flemish painting from the 16th to the 18th century, on view through November 6, 2005. For the first time, the museum kunst palast is staging a major survey exhibition of pictures from its collection of 275 works by Dutch and Flemish painters. The long-lasting partner of the foundation, the E.ON AG, supports the great exhibition „A celebration of painting“ generously. About 190 selected paintings dating from the 16th to the 18th century from this own collection, supplemented by 70 drawings and prints and also by approx. 37 outstanding loans from private and public collections will be on show.

Alongside large-format historical narrative paintings from Caesar Boetius van Everdingen to Jan Victoors, the sumptuous splendour of luxuriant still-lifes from Jan Pieter Brueghel to Frans Snyders, the virtuoso works of the Leiden precision-painters Frans and Willem van Mieris, and the highly allusive genre scenes of Cornelis Dusart and Adriaen van Ostade, this overview of the “Golden Age of Painting” is rounded off above all by the atmospheric landscapes of such leading artists as Jan van Goyen, Joos de Momper and Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael.

This exhibition is also bringing to the public eye for the first time works which have long led a Sleeping-Beauty existence in the museum’s depot. Others in turn have undergone interesting re-attributions, and, thanks to restoration, can now be seen in a new light – like 80 of the presenting paintings. Using the example of a study by Adam Frans van der Meulen, long believed to be lost, showing King Louis XIV on horseback, a virtual picture-show tells the exciting story of the rediscovery and the removal of overlying layers of paint.