The British Museum has recently mounted a small and rather underwhelming display about Graeco-Roman gems. This fascinating, although esoteric subject, would not normally attract large numbers of visitors. However, the display seems to have drawn a significant amount of attention. This must, in part at least, be because it has been used to exhibit a few recently recovered gems, which come from the group of about 2,000 objects, the loss of which was announced in a dramatic fashion last year, as part of a sequence of events that have had such a corrosive impact on the museum’s status.

On display in the Mauritshuis is an intimate selection of carefully chosen works by Roelant Savery (1576/78–1639), forty-three in total, of which twenty-four are works on paper and nineteen are paintings. The small number of exhibits signals by no means a weakness of the show. At present, a total of three hundred paintings and 250 drawings are attributed to Savery, and more works are constantly emerging from lesser-known collections and are appearing on the art market. However, Savery’s later paintings fall short of the artistic qualities displayed in his early period and at the peak of his career, which are the focus here.