The Singer Laren collection was originally formed by the American painter William Singer and his wife Anna Singer Brugh. From c. 1880 onwards they collected artworks from French, American and Dutch contemporaries and friends. Since the founding of the Singer Memorial Foundation in 1954 the collection has expanded and broadened with Modernist artists, mostly in relation to the former artists colony Laren-Blaricum.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century drew a lot of American painters to The Netherlands.
Attracted by the pastoral surroundings, the great tradition of the Dutch seventeenth century and the contemporary Hague School, they settled in artists colonies such as Laren, Katwijk and Volendam. There they created a vision of Dutch society underpinned by a nostalgic yearning for a pre-modern way of life, full of references to America’s own colonial Dutch heritage and the values and virtues the Dutch exemplified in their eyes.
The exhibition is organized in association with the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah (GA) and shows some seventy paintings by artists such as William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, George Hitchcock and Gari Melchers, who all made fame with paintings for which Holland served not only as an example but also as a guide.