Dutch painting in Soviet museums

The artistic genius of the Dutch has always found its highest expression in painting. Their canvases are valued the world over for warmth, liveliness, colour, keen observation of human behaviour and peerless execution. Russian collectors over the centuries amassed an extraordinary ireasure of Dutch works, studded with jewels by such masters as Rembrandt, Lucas van Leyden, Frans Hals, Vincent van Gogh, and Kees van Dongen. The volume is broad in scope, covering five centuries of Dutch painting from its beginnings in the fifteenth century. It is particularly rich in works from the seventeenth century - the Golden Age of Dutch art. The Introduction with its account of how the Soviet Union acquired its impressive collection was written by the late Yury Kuznetsov, an eminent Soviet art historian. The plates are accompanied by individual commentaries that offer brief biographies of the artists, the history of each work and much other informalion that will be of interest to scholars and art lovers alike. The author of the commentaries is Irene Linnik, an authority on European painting, whose work on the attribution of Dutch paintings in Soviet collections, has won universal recognition.