DR ERIN GRIFFEY

Curator. Rembrandt Remastered New Zealand Tour

 

Dr. Erin Griffey is the Head of Art History at The University of Auckland. She is an international authority on seventeenth-century portraiture and patronage, especially Dutch, Flemish and British art.

 

She specialised in Netherlandish art for her postgraduate work at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she did extensive work on Rembrandt for both her MA and PhD.

 

She is the foremost specialist on Rembrandt in Australasia, having taught a full-year Honours paper on Rembrandt for the last 13 years at The University of Auckland and supervised two PhDs and numerous MA theses and Honours dissertations on various aspects of Rembrandt's work.

 

She has spoken about Rembrandt at conferences, symposia and public lectures in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Amsterdam, Venice and London, and published on aspects of Rembrandt's self-portraits. She has published widely on Netherlandish and British art, and has a book coming out this autumn with Yale University Press.

 

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PROFESSOR ERNST VAN DE WETERING

Ex Chairman of The Rembrandt Remastered Project Amsterdam

  

Ernst van de Wetering was first trained as an artist at the (Dutch) Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. He received his doctorate in art history from the University of Amsterdam. 

 

Since 1968, he was a member, and then became Chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project. He was art historian on the staff of Amsterdam’s  Central Research Laboratory for Restoration From 1969 to 1987, he then became a full professor of history of art at the University of Amsterdam. 

 

He has published extensively on historic painting techniques, as well as in the field of theory and ethics of conservation and restoration.

 

In 1990, he succeeded Josua Bruyn as chair of the Rembrandt Research Project, the team of scholars that was charged with tracking down Rembrandt’s works, authenticating them and, when needed, conserving the paintings. 

 

As of 2011, the project has published five volumes on Rembrandt’s work, the know

Rembrandts, and the techniques used by the painter.

 

ASSESSMENT OF REMBRANDT

In most of his writing and lectures, van de Wetering portrays Rembrandt as a painter who struggled to create as many marketable paintings as possible, and whose studio turned out a large number of paintings with varying amounts of work by Rembrandt and his apprentices. He was also able to discover a number of Rembrandt’s works which had been repainted by the artist to make them more commercially acceptable.

 

REMBRANDT'S USE OF LIGHT

Van de Wetering is the voice of dissent when it comes to the significance of light in Dutch 17th-century painting. He doubts that it was a factor at all and says there were as many kinds of light as there were ways of painting. It was not a question of light, he adds, but of a painter’s methods and style. He has also written several academic papers debunking the myth that Claude Monet painted only with natural light.

 

AWARDS

In 2003, van de Wetering was presented with the Heritage Preservation/College Art Association Joint Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation at Oxford University, where he has been a frequent guest lecturer. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford for 2002–03.

 

WORKS

Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (2000). University of Amsterdam.

 

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JOHN DOW

Director - New Zealand Tour
 

John Dow and his company Agenda are the Directors of the New Zealand Tour. John has been involved in successful Arts and Exhibition initiatives within NZ and internationally for over 30 years.

 

He was involved in promoting the inaugural New Zealand International Festival of the Arts in 1986 and was the Marketing Director for both the 1990 and 1992 Festivals.

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Through this work he successfully marketed all genres of the arts and supported a wide range of exhibitions.

 

The 1992 event being the first to produce a surplus and solid event infrastructure that helped establish the foundation for the Festival to evolve and flourish in subsequent years.

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He has worked on tours through New Zealand of prominent international artists such as Cleo Laine and John Dankworth and the Dutch Swing College Band.

 

He was the Director for 3 International Jazz and Blues Festivals held in Wellington in the late 1980’s.

 

As the Event Director for Parade ’98 – Vietnam Remembered and Tribute ’08 – A Vietnam Commemoration he oversaw all aspects of the Ceremonial, Entertainment, Commemorative and Exhibition components of both events.

 

He worked on the Kiwa Exhibition in Vancouver on behalf of Toi Maori Aotearoa and was their Project Manager for the highly successful 2005 “Maori Art Meets America” event in San Francisco that is regarded as the largest and highest impact promotion of New Zealand into North America in history.

 

On behalf of the New Zealand Netherlands Foundation he was the Project Director for the World Press Photo Exhibition in Wellington in 2011 and 2012.

 

John is also well known in the sporting world having initiated and secured the A League Football License for Wellington that established the Phoenix as well as having worked with the All Blacks, Tall Blacks, Tall Ferns, All Whites and the AFL.

 

He is also the Director of the Wellington Gold Awards in association with The Post, the region’s business awards now in their 26th year and a Project Manager of The Wellys – The Wellingtonian of the Year now in its 35th year. 

 

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