When Thomas Kaplan began collecting Rembrandts, two of the Dutch master’s paintings cost the same as one work by Andy Warhol.
The collection he has built since 2003, which he shares with his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, is now the world’s largest in private hands. Their 17 Rembrandts rival that of the Rijksmuseum, which has 22, in Amsterdam.
The New Yorker says he is proud to bring his treasures, including lesser known masterpieces by Jan Lievens and Gerrit Dou, as well as a Vermeer and a picture by Frans Hals, to the city of their birth. “Amsterdam is the place that it happened, the mothership,” he said. “To bring these masterpieces to this particular city, where Rembrandt and many of his contemporaries came into maturity is especially meaningful.”
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A self-described “evangelist” for 17th-century Dutch masterpieces, Kaplan is on a mission to celebrate Rembrandt’s universalism and to defend the “golden age” that gave rise to his genius. “Rembrandt is unique. He is special. He is transcendent. He is to painting what Shakespeare has been to literature and Bach to music,” he said.
All of the paintings and one drawing held in his Leiden Collection, which is named after Rembrandt’s birthplace, are in the Dutch capital for a blockbuster exhibition at the H’Art museum, which opens on Wednesday in the year that Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary.
“He was the breakthrough,” Kaplan, 62, said. “The way that he used paint, the way that he used colour, the way that he showed beauty in forms that were considered to be very, very iconoclastic. He basically threw out the rule book on the classical conventions of how to portray beauty. He threw it out. And this changes the rules.”
The Dutch master shaped modern art, he said. “It is the reason that some of the most catalytic artists that followed him — Goya, Delacroix, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, Francis Bacon and so on — regarded him as their formative influence. It’s the freedom that he gave them to be able to express themselves differently. I see in him that universality.”
Kaplan is dismissive of any suggestion that Rembrandt’s work should be re-examined in the context of politically correct or “woke” attacks on the “golden age” of Amsterdam. Just because Rembrandt coincided with the Netherlands’ colonial expansion and slavery did not mean his work was tarnished by association, he said. “I’m not going to erase history. There was a Dutch golden age and I’m not embarrassed to use the expression.
“Every civilisation’s golden age is not going to be golden across the board. That’s just a very, very sad fact of history. It goes back to antiquity. You think of the golden age of Rome. Rome was a slave society but so was most of Africa. People don’t talk about that. There is the Middle East. There was a golden age of Islam but it was also accompanied by slave trade. We could go on and on.”
Before sharing his collection with the world, first in France at the Louvre in 2017 and then China, Kaplan was known as a philanthropist in wildlife conservation after making his billions in precious metals and mining.
He started collecting more than 20 years ago when he was astonished to find that works by Rembrandt changed hands for less than modern works by Warhol or Mark Rothko. His passion goes further back — to the Rembrandt room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he was six years old.
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His mother, concerned about his fixation, tried to get him interested in modern, abstract art but “the first time I encountered a large white canvas with a red line through it I just asked to go back to the Rembrandt room”.
A natural raconteur, many of Kaplan’s paintings come with a story of the deal, often with a pinch of joyful glee. His most expensive Rembrandt is the masterpiece Minerva in Her Study, a great humanist work of art. He bought it in the same week but for less than Warhol’s dystopian 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), which sold for a staggering $72 million.
Another painting he pursued as a “holy grail” was Rembrandt’s Bust of a Bearded Old Man, complete with a carrying case made for Andrew W Mellon, the US secretary of the Treasury at the time of Roaring Twenties Wall Street boom, who took the painting on his travels. After buying the small work, his dealer joked that “you paid more for this than any other painting per square inch in history”.
His collections benefited from the financial crisis. When asked how he felt about having the only privately owned Vermeer in the world, A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, he replied “just great” and laughed.
He bought the painting for about $30 million from Steve Wynn, the controversial American casino and property developer, in 2008 as financial markets and investment portfolios crashed. “I approached him on a Rembrandt self-portrait and he said: ‘Only if you buy them both.’ I just said to the dealer who was intermediating, tell him it’s done — because I also recognised that the Vermeer was never going to come around again.”
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While the Kaplans do not live with any of their collection, which are for his public mission, not a personal hoard, they have their favourites. One of his is a Self-Portrait by Lievens, a friendly rival and contemporary of Rembrandt, who included him, portrayed with a pipe, in his masterpiece Card Players. Rembrandt reciprocated and Lievens is depicted in his work Three Singers (Allegory of Hearing). All are exhibited in H’Art.
“He looks like a French radical in 1968, a great-looking dude,” Kaplan said, recounting how he had to sit down after he was overcome — “not the best negotiating position” — after seeing it hanging in Johnny Van Haeften’s London gallery. “He looks like my oldest son. It is so contemporary.”
• From Rembrandt to Vermeer, Masterpieces From the Leiden Collection runs at H’Art museum in Amsterdam from April 9 to August 24
