“The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a lavish and magnificent display of 229 pictures (mostly 17th-century), is not an exhibition in the usual sense but, rather, a celebration. And the Met has pulled out all the stops. The show, in members’ previews this week, opens to the public on Tuesday, and will no doubt be one of the most-attended events in the Met’s long and glorious history, and deservedly so. What it celebrates is the Golden Age of Dutch painting, the collectors and donors who made the Met’s collection of Dutch pictures the greatest and most comprehensive in the Western Hemisphere, and the Met itself. The exhibit also commemorates, belatedly, the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth (he was born in 1606, but who’s counting), as well as the publication of a handsome, heavy twovolume catalogue raisonné. The boxed set, “Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (Yale University Press, 1,083 pages, $175), was written by the Met’s curator of European painting, Walter Liedtke, who also organized the exhibit. The books serve as the show’s catalog; yet, like the exhibition itself — which almost certainly was a scholarly labor of love — its function is manifold.

The Golden Age of Dutch painting continues to be one of the most popular in all of art, and pictures by that period’s masters were especially loved and sought after by wealthy New York collectors of the Gilded Age — the founding fathers of the Metropolitan Museum. “There was money in the air, ever so much money,” Henry James wrote about the collecting craze in New York in the 1880s, “and the money was to be for all the most exquisitethings.”Inart, thismeant Dutch painting.