Charles Finch

About a month ago I saw The Age of Rembrandt at the Met. Though the show had flaws, particularly in its digressive and fragmented quality - a trait I often like in museum exhibitions, but not here - it would be captious to quarrel too seriously with it, simply because it's the best assembly of Dutch Golden Age painting you're likely to find outside of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, or possibly the Mauritshuis in the Hague and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. For people who love Vermeer, Rembrandt, Maes, and de Hooch as much as I do, the curators could have hung the paintings at random and it would still have been just as absorbing. The show stays up for another six weeks or so, and I would urge anybody who has the opportunity to go see it.

But there were two small, significant disappointments of the show, for me. The first was that I don't believe, though I looked, that they had managed to find anything by the terrific Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt's who died young and who, in a mitigating factor, only made about a dozen paintings that have survived. But the show's second omission was worse, for me: it didn't include anything by one of my private favorites, Jan Verspronck.

I've been waiting to find Verspronck in a big show. A replica of this small masterpiece hangs above the desk where I write. He was a painter who undeniably cultivated his own style, rare in an era when famous painters produced dozens of students who flooded the market with work imitative of their masters. His legacy in the art world outside of Holland remains elusive, but I challenge anybody to look at his work and not find it as interesting and telling, in its own way, as any of the other work (aside from Rembrandt's and Vermeer's) of the era.