photos by Takaaki Iwabu - tiwabu@newsobserver.com
By the time the Rembrandt van Rijn exhibit closed Sunday at the N.C. Museum of Art, 150,905 visitors had viewed the collection. A record 7,212 people visited the museum on Saturday alone.
RALEIGH -- At first, Rembrandt van Rijn doesn't seem like a painter who could draw 150,000 people to a Raleigh museum - more than Picasso or Norman Rockwell - at $18 per adult ticket.
It's a long way from the 17th-century Dutch Republic to 21st-century North Carolina, especially when your portrait subjects are dressed in neck ruffles and skull caps, painted mostly in browns and blacks.
But the N.C. Museum of Art crossed that mark at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, the final day of Rembrandt's three-month stint, which drew 150,905 visitors - an attendance that ranks an all-time third behind Claude Monet with his water lilies and AugusteRodin with his "Thinker."
"The curators actually thought we'd be lucky to get 100,000," said NCMA director Larry Wheeler. "Once people saw it, they saw how interesting it was, to see up-close and explore the hand of Rembrandt and develop a little connoisseurship of their own."
The exhibition of nearly 50 paintings set a record Saturday for single-day attendance when the paintings attracted a crowd of 7,212 people. They stood four deep at each of the artist's three self-portraits, noting the blemishes and wrinkles he was careful to include.
"It wasn't even a free day," said Natalie Braswell, NCMA's assistant marketing manager.
"Rembrandt in America" gathered more than $1 billion worth of artwork loaned by private collections and other museums, billed as the largest collection ever assembled in America. "There's a lot of superlatives associated with this exhibition," Braswell said. "The largest collection of Rembrandts ... the first time it's shown here."
Bringing Rembrandt here represented a risk for the NCMA. The show could prove the museum's ability to draw big crowds outside of a major city. But if the turnout was weak, it may have raised questions about the wisdom of constructing a new $86.2 million building during a recession and largely at taxpayers' expense.
But goals for the Rembrandt exhibit passed all expectations. On Sunday, the parking lots overflowed with cars, and visitors filled state government lots across Blue Ridge Road. "The name alone is going to be a draw," said Jim Howard, 33, a geologist from Durham. "Everybody knows the name."
A joke came to Howard's mind as he finished viewing the paintings: "Hugh Hefner has been quoted as saying, 'Rembrandt went through his brown period, and I'm going through my blonde period.' But look at these paintings - It looks like Rembrandt had a pretty long brown period."
The show combined "autograph works" that are authentic Rembrandts and paintings thought to be his at the time they entered American collections but which can no longer be attributed to him.
Chris Plankers, a Raleigh artist who also works at the Landmark Tavern, thought it odd to see paintings in a Rembrandt show tagged with other artists' names. "It was a little heavy on stuff not attributed to him," he said. "But it was good. It's not every day you get to see a Rembrandt."
Then he added, as an observation more than criticism: "Lot of neck ruffles."
