A gathering of masterpieces: Couple share their love of art with historic gift to Museum of Fine Arts
April 26, 2018 | In the PressFrom EagleTribune.com (http://www.eagletribune.com/news/lifestyles/a-gathering-of-masterpieces-couple-share-their-love-of-art/article_21d0ab44-46be-5332-8387-694a41c85a3a.html)
When Rose-Marie Jacobs met Eijk van Otterloo on a blind date in Boston in 1973, the two were instantly attracted to each other. It was the start of a lifelong bond, but also an extensive art collection.
“It was a Saturday night, and we went with a neighbor to a VFW event, which was $10 for all the shrimp you could eat and all the beer you could drink,” Rose-Marie van Otterloo said. “It was love at first sight for me. It was amazing, something I would never have believed.”
The two young professionals, working in the finance industry and living in Boston at the time, found that they had far more in common than the business world.
In addition to sharing a European heritage, they also shared a love of art and antiques.
The couple married a year later and began hunting around estate sales. They began collecting paintings and other goods, which started to fill the Marblehead home into which they moved full time in 1976.
Piece by piece, they would eventually amass a collection fit for royalty. And more than 40 years later, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston would become the beneficiary of their prized art collection, composed of 87 paintings.
When the van Otterloos, together with fellow collectors Susan and Matthew Weatherbie, donated their collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art to the museum, it was the largest gift of European paintings that the revered art institution had ever received.
The gift includes portraits, landscapes, seascapes, still-life and architectural paintings and nearly doubles the museum’s holdings of Dutch and Flemish artworks.
Among the treasures is a nearly 400-year-old Rembrandt from 1632 titled “Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh,” which was donated by the van Otterloos. This brings the museum’s holdings of Rembrandt to six paintings.
“Masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish Painting” is a special display in the museum’s European galleries. A selection of works from each donated collection is juxtaposed with Dutch and Flemish paintings from the MFA’s holdings.
Due to the popularity of the works, the exhibit has been extended through May 6, nearly four months after it was originally scheduled to close.
Karen Frascona, the museum’s director of public relations, said that since the announcement of the gift in October, the public response has been tremendous.
“Visitors have been consistently flocking to the galleries,” she said. “We’re incredibly grateful to the van Otterloos and Weatherbies for their generosity, and thrilled that we’re able to continue to display these masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish art.”
Rose-Marie is excited about the response to the artworks.
“We are thrilled, of course, to see the reaction of the public, and to see that the old masters are not dead,” she said. “People still love the Dutch art.”
Nascent treasure hunting
The van Otterloos’ efforts grew from a pastime of taking trips to the countryside into attending sales and auctions.
“We’d hope to find things that might be fun in the house, a piece of furniture or an art object,” Rose-Marie said. “We had a farmhouse in New Hampshire, so for a long time we collected things that had to do with horses and carriages. We didn’t set out to make a collection. It was something to be fun and find things to hang on our walls. But once we had 19 or 20 paintings, we said, ‘This is going somewhere.’”
When the couple moved to Marblehead, they met the curator of European paintings for the MFA, Peter Sutton, who at the time lived in Salem. He suggested that they collect Dutch and Flemish art because they could do research in their native language — Rose-Marie was born in the Flemish part of Belgium, and Eijk was born in Holland.
“This is our heritage, and this is what we decided we wanted to do,” Rose-Marie said.
They also had the good fortune to meet the directors of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which houses the national art collection of the Netherlands, and the director of the Mauritshuis, which houses Dutch paintings of the Golden Age. These people, and others, guided the van Otterloos in their collecting efforts over the decades.
“For us, it has been an awful lot of fun and we made a lot of friends, not only among the dealers but among the curators and directors of museums,” Rose-Marie said. “We could not have put this collection together without the help of all these people willing to give their opinion. These friendships have made our lives richer.”
The next generation of van Otterloos also enjoys their parents’ penchant for world-class art.
“Our children loved it every time a new painting arrived,” Rose-Marie said.
The first painting they collected was a work by Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), which is part landscape and part village scene with a group of people. This work hangs in the hallway as one enters the Dutch gallery at the MFA.
The van Otterloos often shared their artworks, which have been loaned to museums such as the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University, The National Gallery in London and Rijksmuseum.
When the van Otterloos decided to donate their collection to the MFA, they reached out to the Weatherbies, fellow collectors of Dutch art.
“We were always at the same auctions and shows,” Rose-Marie said. “When we made up our minds to give our collection to the MFA, my husband invited them to join us in this giving, and it took them only one day to decide. They have paintings that are different and complement our collection and the museum’s collection.”
The result is the creation of the most comprehensive collection of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art in the United States.
“We hope that there will be more collaboration of museums in the U.S. and around the world,” Rose-Marie said.
The van Otterloos and Weatherbies have donated more than art. They will fund the establishment of the Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA, a first of its kind in the United States, with an estimated launch date of 2020.
Additionally, the van Otterloos will donate their library to the new research center, comprising more than 20,000 monographs, catalogs and rare books, which were assembled by late art historian Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann.
Future works and memories
Once adorned with colorful masterpieces, the walls in the van Otterloos’ Marblehead home are currently bare, with the exception of one painting that is an heirloom from Eijk’s side of the family. It is a biblical scene of Jacob and Esau.
After 43 years of marriage, the couple still enjoy the thrill of scouting artworks, with interests in the Hague School along with 20th-century artworks.
“We’ve started to buy a few pieces because it was not fun to look at empty walls,” Rose-Marie said with a chuckle.
They also relish the memories of the fun they had collecting each of the masterworks they recently donated. The art of bargaining and deal-making are part of the adventure when they seek out prized artworks.
One of those pieces has a sweet tale.
While many wives may receive flowers from their husbands on special occasions, Rose-Marie received the quintessential gift of an art lover: a bouquet that could never die.
For many years, she had her eye on a work titled “Still Life with Roses in a Glass Vase” by Dutch artist Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621).
“But my husband and the dealer couldn’t come to an agreement with the price, so I never thought it would enter our collection,” she said.
When they were in London during art week in December 1995, which coincided with her 50th birthday, she wondered whether the piece was still for sale. She told her husband she wanted to go see the dealer, Johnny van Haeften, to inquire about the still life of roses, and he replied, “Oh, that’s a good idea.”
“And off we went. When we got there, it was still there, but I could see it was sold because there was a red sticker on it,” she said. “Johnny said he called my husband to inform him that he had a buyer because he knew I was interested in it, but (Eijk) had said it was just too expensive.”
The next day, Rose-Marie was at a birthday luncheon when the art dealer’s young daughter walked in and approached her.
“She said, ‘I have something for you,’ and pulled the painting out of a paper bag,” Rose-Marie said.
Visitors to the MFA are greeted by this 12-by-14-inch painting, albeit without the paper bag, as it’s the first work on display in the exhibit.
