A selection of powerful portraits of the Dutch Golden Age by internationally renowned Spanish artist Lita Cabellut will be exhibited in Paris at the notorious Opera Gallery.

Indeed, Cabellut will make a stopover in the city of light - between a trip to Tokyo accompanying the Dutch State Visit to the East in October and what promises to be a magnificent display at two prominent museums in India in the Spring 2015 - to show a few key pieces of her new series. These paintings, representing the different cultural influences of the interchange of knowledge, shared values and arts on Dutch Society, bring back these Golden times.

“The black tulip is a symbol of the willingness and entrepreneurship to explore new worlds.” - Lita Cabellut

Internationally known Spanish-Dutch artist Lita Cabellut escaped from her life as an orphan on the streets of Barcelona at the age of 12 and later found a place in a lovely family where education and art were highly treasured. Her passion for the Arts was Lita’s way to express her sorrows and joy even before she learned to read.

“Art is my voice and my eyes. If you look at my portraits, you’ll see a conversation with my mind and my soul. My inspirations for this series are the great masters: Vermeer, Velasquez, Goya.”

“When I look at portraits of Vermeer I have the feeling that the paint is still fresh; I can smell the oils and the white spirit from Goya and Velasquez. This is what these great masters do to me: their magic and knowledge still inspire me strongly.”

The Golden Age

For this series, Lita Cabellut has focused her work on the complex international social and trade relations during the Dutch Golden Age. By doing so, she highlights on the one hand the Puritan frugal rigor and on the other hand the Baroque clothing inspired by the Spanish Catholics. She also points the differences between nobles, merchants and soldiers, each with their own style and fashion.

“The Golden Age was a period of passion and revolution in the human mind and is a wonderful historical turning point with unprecedented diversity: passion, longing, sensuality, freedom as well as protest. It was a period of revolution for human rights, art and science as well as for politics.”

This was the era of the temptation of beauty come from the East: new fragrances, music, fabrics and theatre. The muses of the Arts declared a war and were victorious against fanaticism and the dark thoughts of the world. The rights of Human Nature started shining from this very moment: the Golden Age.”(Lita Cabellut 2014)

The Black Tulip

The title of Lita Cabellut’s exhibition ‘The Black Tulip’ is inspired by the famous national symbol of the Netherlands. In the early 16th Century, the tulip was brought to the country from Turkey and quickly became a symbol of power and wealth. In the 1730s, the prices of tulips rose so high that some people were willing to pay the same amount for a bag of tulip bulbs as they would for a row of Amsterdam canal-side houses.

There was a quest for the ultimate tulip: the ‘Black Tulip’. In 1672, a contest took place in Haarlem where 100,000 guilders were promised to whoever would succeed to grow the first black tulip. However, to this day, no one has ever been able to grow such a tulip…

“To me, the Black Tulip symbolises the Dutch people’s mercantile spirit. They succeeded in turning something as transitory, vulnerable and unpredictable as the tulip into something of value, with such determination. The belief in the possibility of the black tulip is still a symbol of the willingness and entrepreneurship to explore new worlds.” (Lita Cabellut 2014)