NEW YORK, NY.- The Leiden Collection, amongst the largest and most important collections of seventeenth-century Dutch art in private hands, today announced the departure of its curator, Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt, who concludes nearly six years of service this September. Yeager-Crasselt joined the collection in 2017 and during the course of her tenure co-curated perceptive exhibitions, made new research widely available through the Collection’s online catalogue, and facilitated collaborations with institutions nationally and internationally. Yeager-Crasselt will assume the role of Curator of European Painting and Sculpture and Department Head at the Baltimore Museum of Art at the end of the month.
“On behalf of my family and the entire Leiden Collection team, we offer our sincere gratitude to Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt for her remarkable scholarly contributions,” said Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, founder of The Leiden Collection. “She provided fresh and exciting insights into the work of Rembrandt and his followers through thought-provoking exhibitions organized around the world and across the nation. Lara’s legacy shall leave a particularly lasting impact on our catalogue, a considerable resource for Rembrandt and seventeenth-century Dutch art.”
During her time with The Leiden Collection, Dr. Yeager-Crasselt co-curated The Leiden Collection’s world tour at the National Museum of China in Beijing; the Long Museum, West Bund in Shanghai; The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow; The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg; and Louvre Abu Dhabi. These critically acclaimed exhibitions, each with their own topics and themes, shared with a large and diverse public the Collection’s extraordinary character and scope and offered new understandings of Dutch Golden Age art within a global context.
Yeager-Crasselt also initiated and developed a series of focus exhibitions, organized in collaboration with museums and university art galleries across the United States. These thematically driven exhibitions centered around select groups of works from The Leiden Collection to contribute to broader dialogues on Dutch art. Exchanging Words: Women and Letters in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting is currently on view at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego. The exhibition, which she curated, explores how the depiction of women reading, writing, and receiving letters in Dutch genre paintings in the second half of the seventeenth century contributed to, and challenged, various societal ideas surrounding women’s education, literacy, and learning.
Dr. Yeager-Crasselt also served as Co-Editor of The Leiden Collection’s online catalogue along with Dr. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Senior Advisor to The Leiden Collection. During her tenure, she oversaw the introduction of the 3rd edition of the catalogue, which invited contributions by leading scholars in the field to author original essays germane to the artists and major themes of the Collection.
“I first had the pleasure of teaching Lara as a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and have since grown to admire her as a trusted colleague,” said Wheelock. “It has been an enormous pleasure to work with her as a peer to edit and expand the online catalogue.”
Making the Collection more broadly accessible has been a major focus of Dr. Yeager-Crasselt’s work. In addition to spearheading The Leiden Collection’s first scholarly symposium, Reflecting on Rembrandt, co-organized with the Morgan Library & Museum in 2020, she also shepherded notable digital partnerships with Google Arts & Culture and the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague to make the Collection’s paintings more readily available and more widely understood through the sharing of high resolution images and research documents.
