Rijksmuseum gives place of honour to newly acquired still life by Golden Age artist Maria van Oosterwijck – The Art Newspaper

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is celebrating the addition to its everlasting assortment of a prized work by Maria van Oosterwijck, one of many main Dutch girls painters of the Golden Age. The portray, Vanitas Nonetheless Life (round 1690)—that includes a human cranium as a memento of human mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly items—has been positioned within the museum’s gallery of honour. It takes its place in a sequence of areas containing masterpieces by Johann Vermeer, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Rembrandt, and concluding with the gallery dedicated to the last-named’s celebrated Night time Watch (1642).

“Work by Maria van Oosterwijck are exceptionally uncommon due to the restricted physique of labor that she left to posterity,” the museum’s normal director, Taco Dibbits, stated in a press release. “Just some 30 works by the artist have survived to the current day… We’re delighted that, with this portray, we are able to supply her the place of honour that she deserves.”

Van Oosterwijck was a famous determine within the second half of the Seventeenth century, admired for the standard of her flower work, and patronised by lots of Europe’s rulers, together with Emperor Leopold I of Austria (one other vanitas portray by Van Oosterwijck, of 1668, is within the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna); the British co-monarchs William and Mary (two floral nonetheless lifes by Van Oosterwijck from the Royal Assortment are on present at Kensington Palace, in London); Cosimo III de’ Medici in Florence; and the Solar King himself, Louis XIV.

Following two years of analysis and restoration, the portray was unveiled—adjoining to the artist’s 1671 portrait by Wallerant Vaillant, through which she carries palette and brushes in a single hand as she turns the pages of a Bible with the opposite—on 4 March, the day of the fourth annual Girls within the Museum symposium on the Rijksmuseum. The symposium was attended by researchers and curators from establishments together with the Nationwide Gallery and Nationwide Portrait Gallery, in London, and the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It has been held since 2022, within the week of Worldwide Girls’s Day, by the Girls of the Rijksmuseum analysis venture, which has been devoted since 2021 to growing the visibility of girls within the assortment and its gallery show. That work has been funded since 2022 by the Girls of the Rijksmuseum Fund, with Chanel Arts & Tradition becoming a member of the venture in 2023 as a associate of the Girls of the Rijksmuseum analysis venture and as supporter of the annual symposium, analysis on feminine tales and associated acquisitions.

The Girls of the Rijksmuseum venture employs seven younger researchers and has overseen the acquisition of works by artists together with Van Oosterwijck’s contemporaries Gesina ter Borch, Aleijda Wolfsen, Maria Sibylla Merian and Johanna Koerten; the French romantic novelist George Sand; Thèrése Schwartze, the favorite portraitist of Dutch Nineteenth-century excessive society; and the US modern artist Carrie Mae Weems. It has additionally supported exhibitions together with Barbara Hepworth within the Rijksmuseum Gardens (2022), Girls on Paper (2022-2023) and Carrie Mae Weems: Portray the City (till 9 June).

A ‘visible sermon’

The acquisition of Vanitas Nonetheless Life in 2023 from a personal collector—when it grew to become one among solely two examples of the artist’s work in Dutch institutional collections (the Mauritshuis, within the Hague, has a Flowers in an Decorative Vase of round 1670-75)—was made attainable by help from the Pals’ Lottery (Vriendenloterij) and the Girls of the Rijksmuseum Fund.

Jenny Reynaerts, the senior curator of work and chair of the Girls of the Rijksmuseum, tells The Artwork Newspaper that Friso Lammertse, the museum’s curator of Seventeenth-century artwork, who oversaw the acquisition, refers back to the portray as a “visible sermon”. The checklist of references from Christian scripture that hangs off the entrance of the marble tabletop on which the nonetheless life is organized, Reynaerts says, “present the important thing” to the objects within the portray which symbolise the Biblical idea of vanitas, together with a pocket watch, a Bible and two tablets bearing the Ten Commandments.

However the portray accommodates symbols not simply of non secular devotion, Reynaerts says, for which the artist was well-known, but additionally of her skilled honours. There’s a miniature portrait with a big pendant pearl, close to the desk’s edge, of the Empress of Austria (as soon as considered a self-portrait of the artist). The empress and her husband, Emperor Leopold I, have been the artist’s purchasers for the sooner vanitas canvas now within the Kunsthistorisches Museum assortment. The imperial miniature and the rings and pearl necklace within the jewelbox on the left foreground of the portray symbolize tokens of esteem from Van Oosterwijck’s royal clientele, Reynaerts says.

The restoration course of revealed that the artist had made many modifications throughout the portray course of. An hourglass—a logo of the passing of time that’s current within the Vienna vanitas—was sooner or later painted out, as was a snake. The artist additionally altered, Reynaerts says, the dialogue or stress between the sunflower and the cranium, which face one another throughout the canvas.

The Girls of the Rijksmuseum analysis venture

The Girls of the Rijksmuseum venture was launched in 2021, however the incentive, Reynaerts says, got here from 2019, earlier than the worldwide pandemic, when a journalist approached all Dutch museums, in reference to Worldwide Girls’s Day, to ask what number of girls artists these establishments held. “Like nearly all the opposite museums,” Reynaerts says, “we did not have the numbers.” The museum launched into a analysis course of, which Reynaerts was requested to arrange, “and I lovingly did it as a result of it is a topic that is actually pricey to my coronary heart”. In 2022 the museum launched the Girls of the Rijksmuseum Fund. The next yr, Chanel joined as a associate, supporting each the analysis programme and its annual symposium, “which was nice” Reynaerts says, “as a result of they’ve this mission of range and inclusion within the museum world … and that is our frequent function”.

In London, in the meantime, the Nationwide Portrait Gallery is working with the Chanel Tradition Fund on Reframing Narratives: Girls in Portraiture, a three-year venture designed to redress the steadiness of feminine illustration within the assortment. Nearly half (48%) of the overall portraits on show within the gallery made after 1900 now function girls, up from one-third in 2020. As a part of that venture, the Pop Artwork pioneer Jann Haworth and her daughter Liberty Blake created Work in Progress (2021-22), a seven-panel collage mural depicting 130 inspiring girls, which has spurred extra commissions for Haworth and Blake’s ongoing sequence together with a further set of panels made for this yr’s World Financial Discussion board in Davos.

The primary public-facing venture on the Rijksmuseum, in 2021, was to put girls artists within the gallery of honour, marking the primary event that ladies had featured within the area for the reason that basis of the museum in 1885. Three work by girls artists have been put in, together with the Vaillant portrait of Van Oosterwijck. That presence has been maintained and rotated within the gallery in succeeding years, all the time with a view to high quality and to debates about tokenism.

In exploring the legacies of girls in Dutch historical past and to what extent they’re seen within the Rijksmuseum assortment, Reynaerts and her colleagues have arrange three pillars of analysis. The primary is the gathering of knowledge on feminine artists of their assortment. The second is to review girls’s historic presence. “We now have a whole lot of girls who we all know solely because the spouse of, the daughter of, or the mom of,” Reynaerts says. “And so they all have their very own story, however no one ever requested about it. And we now have discovered that when you delve into the archives, info is pretty simple to seek out on what these girls did or what they have been.” The third is the Rijksmuseum’s personal institutional historical past.

“There have been girls working within the museum for a very long time,” Reynaerts says. Inside that class are feminine donors, whose identification was typically hid behind their husband’s identify when “typically it seems they’re the collectors or the curators of a household heritage which was then left to the museum”.

A collaboration that the venture ran with the College of Amsterdam, referred to as “The Spouse Of”, yielded insights into Seventeenth-century Dutch historical past. “We now have all these portraits,” Reynaerts says. “You recognize, a person: his identify, his title, his perform, his dates. After which there may be the label of the lady, and she or he’s the spouse of this man … we are able to do higher than that. So the Rijksmuseum venture group engaged with the scholars to deliver out the life tales of those girls and learnt that they have been generally the spouse of the brewer, the spouse of the printer, … and that they weren’t solely the spouse. These have been partnerships.”

“These girls have been very lively in society”, Reynaerts says. Their lives serve, she provides, as a counter to the obtained “Nineteenth-century standpoint—of girl at residence, husband at work”, that has historically been projected on to the historical past of the Seventeenth century.

An object-first focus

At this yr’s Girls within the Museum symposium, titled Material of Fame: Materiality versus the canon, the main target was not as regards to untold tales, or ignored lives, Reynaerts says, however on objects. As a means of “widening” the narrative past “beginning with the names” of ignored girls.

The keynote was given by Hélène Delalex, the heritage curator on the Château de Versailles, who’s concerned within the exhibition Marie Antoinette Type opening on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in September, and spoke on Marie Antoinette’s affect on ornamental arts within the 18th century. The proceedings questioned why individuals communicate of “Louis Quatorze” or “Louis Seize” model, Reynaerts says, when “it was the ladies who have been the model icons”. However, trying on the interval by objects, Reynaerts provides, reveals that Marie Antoinette—who had an in depth say in organising how the royal flats have been organized, one thing that Delalex revealed, primarily based on latest analysis at Versailles—had her personal stamp placed on the furnishings she designed.

The symposium checked out ornamental arts and prints as examples of genres typically made by collectives. In lots of instances names had traditionally been “neglected or overwritten or deemed not vital”, Reynaerts says. She cites the instance of the late-Eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry, the place it’s recognized that it was made by “well-known English embroiderers”. Historical past doesn’t report their particular person names however the collective and the monastery they have been primarily based at is understood. “The story has all the time centered on the story of William the Conqueror and Harold. So ranging from the artwork object or the historic object widens the sphere.”

Reynaerts stresses the significance of taking the time to establish names inside collectives. She mentions a late-18th-century desk within the Rijksmuseum assortment, with inlaid Wedgwood panels, in porcelain. “There have been girls within the Wedgwood manufacturing facility who made these. We all know their names. We even know the identify of the one who made the plaques in our furnishings.”

“So we point out them,” Reynaerts says. “It is generally that simple.”

Carrie Mae Weems: Portray the City, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, till 9 June