By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout At the origin of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection lies a story of a king who first lost his crown, then his country, and then his freedom. The king in question was Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland who, like England’s King Charles I, was better…
I went to Prague to look at paintings in museums, but I found out that the best art there is not necessarily on the walls inside but on the ones outside. In other words, there is so much architectural beauty to be found in the city’s buildings, streets, and views that it surpasses the art…
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout While many art fans might not be able to get tickets to the sold-out Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, there is another exhibition of exquisite Dutch Baroque art in Amsterdam that is ongoing at the same time at the nearby museum called Hermitage Amsterdam. The star of this…
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout The sold-out, long-touted, once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is in full swing—crowds of lucky ticket-holders are thronging through a few small rooms. But perhaps this is the right space to exhibit these intimate, delicate pictures that hung forgotten for 200 years until they became the…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout For 15th-century Europeans, sub-Saharan Africa was to a great extent terra incognita until Portuguese explorers started venturing further and further south along the continent’s western coast. These expeditions culminated in 1497 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and on…
Boxer of the Quirinale. C. 330-50 BC. Palazzo Massimo alla Terme. Rome. Photo credit: Nina Heyn. In the history of art, any recovery of a lost masterpiece is a happy event, but such events are more rare than an art loss. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Sometimes, there is hope for a lost…
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Rembrandt van Rijn (1633). Stolen in 1990 from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Since antiquity, artworks have been the first thing to be looted. By the turn of the 19th century, the collection of war trophies…