The collector Thomas S. Kaplan is self-professedly evangelical about Rembrandt. Over the past two decades, he and his wife, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, have built the Leiden Collection, one of the world’s largest private holdings of 17th-century Dutch art, which now totals more than 220 works. The Art Newspaper reports that Kaplan is in discussions to fractionalise the collection into shares and float it as an IPO (initial public offering).
Around a third will be shown in Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (25 October–29 March 2026), marking the collection’s first major US presentation.
The Art Newspaper: You have been collecting since 2003. Are you seeing younger collectors engaging with Old Masters?
Thomas S. Kaplan: If you consider people in their 40s young, then yes, there’ve been more signs of buyers coming into the market. Old Masters have an issue of scarcity: collectors and museums have had a 400-year head start. In our case, we took advantage of a vacuum to buy and create a lending library that has supplemented the collections of some 80 museums worldwide.
The collection we built is a wonderful triumph of having a certain kind of taste, passion and capital—a most lethal combination! The artists I loved were not in vogue but were available. The nature of my personality is that if I’m passionate about something, I go all in.
For the first five years we bought at an average of one painting per week. I haven’t lived with a single [Leiden Collection] painting because I believe they should all be in the public domain, and my wife Daphne feels the same.
Does your collecting intersect with your work with wildlife conservation and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage?
I’d say that those intersections are coincidences. The very first Rembrandt we acquired was a very rare and expensive drawing of a lion. We didn’t intend to go into works on paper, but there’s no doubt that my affinity for big cats and their conservation was an element in that acquisition. If it had been a different subject, I don’t know that we would have reached for it at the time.
Rembrandt was an avant-garde contemporary artist; his rise was meteoric
As to cultural heritage, I fell in love with ancient history and antiquities when I was ten; by the time I was 14, I told my parents I was going to Oxford to study history. That led to boarding school in Switzerland and even those connections led me to becoming a collector. One of my best friends from school introduced me to Norman Rosenthal [then head of the Royal Academy in London]. I’d fallen in love with Rembrandt, and it never occurred to me that one could own one of his works. When he informed me the paintings that I loved were available, I was shocked.
What is your favourite dialogue between works at the Norton show?
We’ll be showing all 17 Rembrandts. We’re also the largest collector of the Rembrandt school in general, from his first pupil, Gerrit Dou, to his last, Arent de Gelder. Many of these paintings fall readily into dialogue because of the way we’ve collected and because in real life the artists were actually working together.
I’ve seen a layout of the Norton show, and I think it’s going to be a knockout—which pleases me to no end. I was living in Florida when I declared I was going to study history in Europe, so it feels like a homecoming, while giving something back to the state in a way I never would have expected.
The exhibition coincides with the 400th anniversary of the Dutch founding of New York. Do you see parallels between artistic production then and now?
I’ll make an observation: all art is contemporary when it’s made. Rembrandt was an avant-garde contemporary artist, and his rise to prominence was meteoric. So was young [Jan] Lievens, who was considered to be on par with his friend Rembrandt, but Lievens went to Antwerp, then London, and became derivative, an acolyte of Van Dyck. Lievens lived long enough to watch his studio mate become a mononym known throughout Europe.
It is estimated that the Dutch Republic, with around two million people, produced between three and five million works of art. Even if 1% of that is considered enduring, one has to conclude that age alone does not guarantee lasting value or cultural relevance.
I happen to like a lot of contemporary art and I’m comfortable living with it. But the likelihood is that only a small percentage of what’s on offer at fairs will stay valuable over time. Much of it will be determined by future generations as secondary, and the following generation will redefine things again. I’m not planning to be around in 400 years to see what happens. I do know that Rembrandt has a really good shot 100, 200 years from now. But the art market is extremely fickle: almost all of the contemporary art made 400 years ago in The Netherlands ended up as kindling. So, I always tell people: don’t assume you’re buying the next Rembrandt. In any event, you’re also not going to live forever. If you live with the art and buy what moves you—what you truly love—you can’t go wrong.
• Art and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collectio, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, 25 October–29 March 2026
