Reframing Rembrandt, one of the Dutch Golden Age’s greats, is no small feat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art seems poised to pull it off, with an exhibition next year that will bring several of the artist’s works to the United States for the first time.
“Rembrandt and the Ancients,” organized with the Louvre Museum and opening in New York in November 2027, is billed as the first in-depth museum examination of the artist’s fascination with the art and mythology of Mediterranean antiquity. It will also be the Met’s first major exhibition dedicated to Rembrandt in 20 years and will mark the US debut of at least three paintings: Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter, Oath of the Batavians, and Woman Bathing in a Stream. The works will join more than 120 paintings, prints, and drawings from more than 40 institutions in what Met CEO and director Max Hollein calls “an unprecedented and powerful ensemble that reveals the depth of Rembrandt’s vision.” The show will be on view in New York from November 2027 through February 28, 2028, after which it will travel to the Louvre.
The exhibition is co-organized by Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, the Met’s curator of European drawings and prints, and Blaise Ducos, who oversees Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Louvre. The Met will draw on its extensive Rembrandt holdings for four paintings, three drawings, and 11 prints—including Aristotle With a Bust of Homer, which was last loaned over 56 years ago—while the Louvre will contribute two paintings and two drawings.
Among the Louvre’s loans is Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter, from 1654, which depicts the heroine grasping King David’s disastrous summons. Rembrandt renders her psychological turmoil spectacularly: Bathsheba’s nude form seems to emit its own light in the darkened room, as if fate itself were closing in. The painting will be displayed alongside an ancient relief borrowed from the National Roman Museum, reportedly introduced to Rembrandt through a reproduction, that inspired his depiction of Bathsheba attended to by a footmaid.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, meanwhile, will loan the monumental Oath of the Batavians (ca. 1661) to the US for the first time. Officially titled The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, the painting depicts an episode recounted in Tacitus’s Histories: the one-eyed Batavian chieftain swearing his compatriots to a rebellion against the Roman Empire in 69–70 CE, sealing their vows with a sword.
“Rembrandt’s engagement with antiquity took wide-ranging and extraordinarily, even wildly creative, forms. Although today this artist is so strongly associated with tradition—the consummate Old Master—his work was, in its moment, remarkably fresh—human, relatable, even raw in its naturalism and emotional immediacy,” Seidenstein said in a statement. “Never one to be satisfied with the expected, he deployed ancient themes to push boundaries—both artistic and social.”