- Good evening, I'm Ian Wardropper,
Director of the Frick Collection,
pleased to welcome you all tonight
to the first lecture
honoring and celebrating
and explicating the exhibition
Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals:
Masterpieces of Dutch
Painting from the Mauritshuis,
which will be here at the
Frick until January 19th.
It gives me great pleasure to
introduce Emilie Gordenker,
Director of the Royal Picture
Gallery at Mauritshuis.
Through the course of working with her
on this wonderful exhibition
that's just opened,
I have come to truly
admire her collegiality,
professionalism, and openness to ideas.
She and her colleagues in The
Hague were generous in loans,
especially when we returned to them
to ask for additional paintings
for the show that's here.
I think our two institutions
collaborated so happily
because we are both house museums
and both aspire to show the very best
of the artistic traditions we represent.
As a result, there's an evident harmony
between the temporary exhibition
here from the Mauritshuis,
though we'd be happy if
it would be permanent,
(audience laughs)
and the permanent collection of the Frick.
This working relationship
was no doubt made easier
because Emilie is no stranger to New York.
She received her doctorate up the street
at the Institute of Fine Arts,
New York University in 1998
for the dissertation Van
Dyck and the Representation
of Dress in 17th Century Portraiture,
which was subsequently published in 2001.
Also in New York she worked
at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the Frick Collection,
and the Netherlands
Institute for Art History,
as well as taught at several
universities in the region.
She's published and lectured widely,
particularly on Dutch and
Flemish art of the 17th century.
She moved to Great Britain in 1999,
eventually becoming Senior Curator
of Early Netherlandish,
Dutch, and Flemish Art
at the National Gallery of Scotland
in Edinburgh in 2003.
Five years later, she became the Director
of the Mauritshuis.
Since taking up her position there,
she has led an ambitious
project to expand that space
for programs and activities
that are hampered
by the tight constraints
of the 1630s house,
which bursts at the seams
in containing the collection
of 800 paintings.
She will take us through
this exciting initiative
in her lecture titled Royal
Picture Gallery Mauritshuis:
Past, Present, and Future.
Emilie?
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much, Ian,
and thank you also for explaining,
or giving the answer to
the question I usually get
at the beginning of
every lecture, which is,
"Why do you speak English
with an American accent?"
Well, now you know.
I'm half-American and half-Dutch
and consider myself
something of a New Yorker,
having lived here for some 12 years.
This evening it's really
a great pleasure for me
to tell you about the
collection and the building
that form the Royal Picture
Gallery Mauritshuis,
and I'm gonna do this in two ways,
first of all by telling you
about the collection's past,
but at the same time by
looking forward to its future.
And this will probably
sound like a paradox,
but the Mauritshuis has
a very rich history,
one that informs where we are as museum
in 2013 and going forward.
Now, anyone who has
visited the Mauritshuis
probably recognizes the image onscreen now
and knows what a special place it is.
The museum combines two
essential ingredients.
It's got a truly great collection of Dutch
and Flemish paintings,
housed in a spectacular
17th century city palace.
The collection is really
remarkable for its focus
and for its quality.
So, it's not a big collection.
As Ian mentioned, 800 paintings.
Most museums would consider that small.
But it's one of the top four in the world
for Dutch paintings, and so
the quality of the collection
of Dutch works is really on a par
with those of the National
Gallery in London,
in Berlin, and at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The building itself is one
of the most remarkable surviving examples
of 17th century architecture
in the Netherlands.
and it provides an impressive,
but at the same time intimate,
atmosphere for the paintings.
And as a result of this small scale
and the wonderful collection,
the Mauritshuis is often
called the jewel box
of Dutch museums.
And for many the Mauritshuis
is the most beautiful museum
in the Netherlands, if not in Europe.
And now I'm very sorry to tell you
that we couldn't bring the building
along with us to New York.
(audience laughs)
So, I'm gonna start by
talking a little bit
about the history of the building
before we go to the
history of the collection.
And the Mauritshuis,
that's by the way the
easiest way to pronounce it,
is named after the man who had it built,
and he's onscreen now,
Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau-Siegen.
Now, Johan Maurits had a motto,
in Latin "qua patet orbis,"
which translates for "as
far as the world extends,"
and this was perfect for a man
who was completely unafraid
of adventures and challenges.
He had a very daring attitude to life
that had been instilled
in him from birth, really.
His grandfather and father,
John the VI and VII of Nassau,
were military men, and so Johan
Maurits was really destined
to become a soldier, or
more than that, an officer.
He was only 17 when he joined the army,
and his star rose so
quickly that he was promoted
to the rank of captain at the age of 22.
He enjoyed many important victories.
Now, at this time the governors
of the West India Company noticed
this very successful young military hero.
The West India Company,
you may be familiar with
the East India Company.
The West India Company was
also set up in the Netherlands
and it conducted shipping
and trade with West Africa
and North and South America.
It also by the way did its
best to undermine the position
of Spain and Portugal outside of Europe.
And so, given these facts, the governors
of the West Indies Company
thought Johan Maurits
might be the man to serve
as governor, captain,
and admiral general of
the territories captured
from the Portuguese in Brazil.
Johan Maurits accepted
and set off for faraway Brazil by ship
on the 25th of October, 1636.
Now, in fact Johan Maurits
is today better known
in Brazil than he is in the Netherlands.
While he was governor there,
Johan Maurits put an end
to Portuguese insurgencies
and set about building a new capitol,
which he of course named
after himself, Mauritsstad,
or Maurits City, and I'm
showing you here a print
of that city on the screen.
Johan Maurits managed
to keep the hostile Portuguese at bay.
He created a climate in
which trade could flourish,
and the success of this
trade, I should say,
was largely due to slave
labor on sugar plantations.
This crop was sold on
to the Dutch Republic.
So, it might seem a bit
of a conflict to say
that even so Johan Maurits was
a truly enlightened governor.
He was much more interested
in things beyond just
economic and military success.
He was curious about the local plantation,
population, excuse me,
and the indigenous plants and animals,
and so what he did was he
brought along scientists
who produced significant
writings about Brazil,
and he also asked artists to join him.
Frans Post and Albert
Eckhout are the best known.
Now, this is a painting by Frans Post
who painted really true to
life Brazilian landscapes.
They have a kind of a naive charm.
And this painting, which
shows the island Itamaraca,
is one that we always
display in the Mauritshuis,
and I can tell you I was
there not so long ago
and it still looks exactly like this.
This is one of only
seven surviving paintings
that the artist made
while he was in Brazil.
The other artist, Albert Eckhout,
concentrated on Brazil's people
as well as its plants and animals,
and his most important
paintings are actually now
in Copenhagen.
It's kind of a long story,
but Johan Maurits liked
to trade his things in
order to upgrade his title,
so off they went, these wonderful.
This is one of a series of paintings
that are now in Copenhagen,
and this shows a native Brazilian figure.
You can't really see it here onscreen,
but it's a full-scale
true to life painting.
Now, it was during this
period that Johan Maurits was
in Brazil that he had
the Mauritshuis built,
right in the middle of The Hague,
and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more
about the building in a moment.
But Johan Maurits was,
during the building project,
still in Brazil, and he
was getting a little itchy
because he felt like he
wasn't getting enough support
from the West Indies Company,
so he resigned in 1642.
Two years later he was back in The Hague,
where he moved into
this beautiful new house
which had just been finished.
And he transformed this city palace
into a grand cabinet devoted to Brazil.
You can imagine.
He commissioned frescoes
of Brazilian landscapes.
He had a huge collection
of all kinds of artifacts,
feathers, he even had people with him,
and mounted animals, musical
instruments, rocks and shells.
It must have been a glorious sight,
and I'm really sorry that
we have absolutely no idea
what it actually looked like,
because there's no record
of the way it was decorated
at the time.
Now, Johan Maurits, I mentioned earlier,
was always after a good title.
He was appointed
Stadtholder of Kleve in 1646
and he immediately set about
building his summer palace.
So, he'd just moved in
here to this Mauritshuis
and he quickly moved on.
While he was away he
would lend out his house.
And this is a print,
this is actually the only
surviving image we have
of the interior of the Mauritshuis,
and it shows a banquet that
was held to mark the departure
of the English King Charles II in 1660.
Johan Maurits was also
elevated to the rank of Prince
by Emperor Ferdinand III in 1652
and appointed Commander in Chief
of the States Army in 1668.
And in that year he had a
garden of the Mauritshuis built
and he had a portrait bust placed in it,
so this is another image of Johan Maurits.
The bust did not continue to serve
as garden sculpture for very long.
In 1669 Johan Maurits
decided to take it with him
to his future tomb in Siegen, Germany,
but we keep this, which
is a copy of the bust,
in our museum.
Johan Maurits, who built the
Mauritshuis, never married
and died on the 20th of December, 1679
right near Kleve.
Now, as I mentioned earlier,
Johan Maurits had this
very impressive city palace
constructed in The Hague
between 1633 and 1644,
and what you see onscreen now is a drawing
by the assistant to the architect
that shows you what it
looked like right at the time
of it being built.
And the location of this
is actually really ideal.
It's located right next to the Binnenhof,
which is still today the
seat of the Dutch government.
And the architect was the best
that the Netherlands had
to offer at the time.
His name was Jacob van Campen.
And van Campen also designed this.
You may recognize it.
It's today the Royal Palace in Amsterdam,
but was built in the 17th century
as the Amsterdam City Hall.
And these two buildings,
the Royal Palace and the Mauritshuis,
are really among the
most striking examples
of Dutch classicist architecture.
And here is the Mauritshuis
seen from the other side.
You might be interested to
know that this round tower here
is actually our Prime Minister's office,
so we have very lofty neighbors.
(audience laughs)
After Johan Maurits died,
all kinds of things
happened to the building.
It came into the hands of the
Maes family who rented it out,
and just before Christmas in 1704,
a huge fire broke out.
The English Duke of
Marlborough was living there
at the time.
And only the outside walls
of the Mauritshuis survived.
There's actually a rumor
that somebody fell asleep,
had probably had a glass of wine too many,
and a candle fell over
and the whole building burst into flames.
Fortunately, the house after
the fire was not demolished,
but restored, and that
took quite a lot of time.
And the decision was made
to preserve the exterior
so that wonderful 17th century
classicist exterior remained,
but that inside of the house was given
a completely new interior,
including a modernized floorplan,
white stucco walls, and a
contemporary mantlepiece.
Now, what I'm showing
you here is what we call
in Dutch the Gouden
Zaal, or the Golden Room,
and this is the grandest
space in the house.
And what you also see in
this slide are paintings
that were installed there at the time
of the renovation cycle
here, and they were done
by the Italian artist
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini,
who was very fashionable,
and he happened to be staying
in The Hague at the time,
so he was commissioned to
provide this cycle of paintings.
And I'm just gonna
fast-forward a little bit
to our time now,
because we removed
these paintings recently
from the interior.
You see them coming down on the top slide.
And we are currently restoring them.
They're almost finished,
and they look absolutely terrific.
Now, in the 18th century
the Mauritshuis was used
as an ambassador's residence.
Later it also served as a military school.
Then the cellars were
rented out for wine storage,
and there was even a time
when it served as a jail,
so a lot happened here.
But finally the Royal Library
moved into the building
in 1807, and it was improved then.
The library got too big,
so in 1820 the Dutch state
bought the Mauritshuis
in order to house the what
they called Royal Cabinets
of Paintings and Curiosities,
and this made the Mauritshuis
a museum once and for all.
It opened its doors to the public in 1822.
I hope I've now given you some idea
of the history of the building,
but the collection has
a very different story.
Its rich history has roots in the holdings
of the Princes of Orange,
and this explains our official name.
We like to be called the Mauritshuis,
but officially we're called
the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.
The collection has seen
many ebbs and flows,
and it's quite different from
some other royal collections
in Europe, which tended to be more stable,
collections like those that you can see
in Vienna and Madrid.
I think we can say that
any European collection,
really a royal collection,
is based on the idea
that an important part
of an enlightened ruler was to collect.
In the case of the Netherlands,
it was really Hendrik III,
the first Count of Nassau,
who started to develop an
interest in art collecting
and made a collection of some importance.
But it was really Frederik Hendrik,
whom you see here on the left,
Prince of Orange and Stadtholder from 1625
who was the most important collector
of 17th century Dutch paintings.
Just in parentheses, I'm
using the term Stadtholder.
The Netherlands didn't have a
king until the 19th century,
but what they did have was representatives
from the royal family who were
the nominal heads of state
and that we call Stadtholder.
Now, Frederik Hendrik you see here
with his wife Amalia von Solms,
had both become acquainted
with the royal courts of
Europe in their youth,
and they came back to The Hague
and must have thought it was a kind
of provincial, poky little place,
so they turned it into a
real princely residence.
They built a lot of buildings,
or renovated in and around the city,
and they also had real
art galleries set up
in the Stadtholder's quarter.
They collected paintings mostly
by contemporary Dutch artists
and had a strong preference for painters
from the city of Utrecht,
and what you see on the
screen here is a work
by Gerard van Honthorst,
the double portrait.
Just to give you another idea,
this is another painting by
Honthorst in our collection
and gives you a sense
that he was very much
a Caravaggio follower.
Now, the inventories of the collections
of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia von Solms
also list works by Rembrandt,
and they had a particular
interest in contemporary art
of the Southern Netherlands.
Kind of strange for us
to think about that now,
but at that time Rubens
was the cutting edge
and very radical.
Frederik Hendrik bought many
paintings by Flemish artists,
including this work.
This is not on view here now.
This in The Hague at the moment,
but this is an oil sketch,
a first idea of what eventually
became the alterpiece
in the Cathedral of Antwerp.
Now, Amalia died in 1675
and all of her possessions,
including this fantastic
collection of art,
were divided up among her heirs.
Three of her daughters were
married to German princes,
so a large part of the collection
left the Dutch Republic for good.
Amalia's grandson, and I'm
showing you here a bust
of William III, had been
Stadtholder since 1672,
and he started building up
the collection once again
by making new acquisitions.
And he branched out and
started to buy Italian works,
which really was a new
course for Dutch collectors.
William III acceded to the
English throne in 1689,
so he became England's
King William III as well,
and at that time he transferred
more than 30 paintings
from the English Royal Collection,
including splendid portraits
by Hans Holbein the Younger
and this fabulous painting by Gerrit Dou,
back to the Netherlands,
so the paintings, like the
Stadtholders and the Kings,
went back and forth across the channel.
And I bring this up because
this beautiful painting came
back home to the Netherlands
and is today an important work
in the Mauritshuis collection.
After the death of William III,
there were more disputes
about the succession
and the division of his property,
and the art collection was
divided up all over again.
A number of masterpieces were
seized by the kings of Prussia
and other important
paintings were auctioned off.
This is William IV Stadtholder
who tried to piece together
the dispersed collection,
and he bought various
collections through bequests,
including paintings that had belonged
to his distant cousin, William III,
and even Amalia von Solms.
So, for example, this
painting, an early work
by Rembrandt, and it's
here at the Frick now.
William III bought this at auction
because it known or thought to be
in the Stadtholders' original collections.
Frederik Hendrik, who had
probably bought this painting
early on, will have known
Rembrandt personally,
and he commissioned quite a number
of works from Rembrandt.
So, this now is in fact back
in the Royal Collection.
William IV also made some
important new acquisitions.
He branched off.
He bought, for example, this painting,
The Bull by Paulus Potter.
This is by far the largest
painting in our collection,
and anyone here who's from
Holland probably knows it.
It's one of the most familiar
Dutch images still today,
But it was actually William V,
the man you see onscreen now,
who was responsible for
making the House of Orange's
collection of paintings
princely yet again.
William V had been
really interested in art
from a very young age,
and he took a serious
interest in collecting.
He had great success at auction.
For example, he bought this
fabulous Garden of Eden,
which is a collaborative work
between Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens.
Brueghel was a specialist
in landscape paintings
and highly detailed animals and figures,
but as you can see here,
Rubens contributed the
figures and the horse.
This kind of collaborative
work was not uncommon
in Flanders at the time,
but what is very uncommon here is
that this work is still in
almost perfect condition.
William V also bought this,
the Susanna by Rembrandt.
It was another high point in collecting
and is here at the Frick Collection now.
It's really a perfect example
of Rembrandt's small
scale biblical paintings
from the 1630s.
Now, when you go into the
exhibition and see this work,
it's gonna look somewhat different.
This is how it looks unframed,
and this is how it
looks in the exhibition.
We know quite a lot about what
happened to this painting.
In the past, someone had the bright idea
of making it square, so there
were corners added to the top
and a whole strip down one side.
The Mauritshuis has a very
eminent research department.
We took a long time to look into this,
and discovered that this
was in fact much closer
to the original format,
and so we had a frame made
with the help of our American friends,
and it is now reframed
and in the exhibition.
William IV and William
V kept their collection
in the Stadtholder's quarter,
but it got so large that
William V needed a new building.
He bought two nearby houses.
One was for his library and
the natural history collection,
and the other was renovated
to accommodate the collection
of over 200 paintings.
It was a real picture gallery,
and it opened in 1774.
He opened it to the public.
We still have the rules.
You were allowed to go at
certain points of the day
and you had to be well-dressed.
Those were the rules.
(audience laughs)
But because it was open to the public,
that makes it the first public
art collection in Holland.
It was a real milestone in Dutch history.
And what you see here is
how the gallery looks today.
It's still a part of the Mauritshuis.
It was renovated recently and reopened by,
sorry it's a small picture,
but this was at the time our Crown Prince
and now is the King of the Netherlands.
So, I encourage you to come
and have a look at the gallery.
Only 20 years after
the gallery was opened,
the paintings were all removed.
What happened was Napoleon
had invaded Holland in 1795.
William V fled and the whole
art collection was seized
and taken to the Louvre in Paris,
where by the way it was a sensation
and really encouraged French
interest in Dutch art.
After Napoleon's defeat
at the Battle of Waterloo,
the Dutch repossessed the paintings
and brought them back to
The Hague by horse and cart,
and I'm showing you here a drawing
of how that looked at the time.
You can see all the
paintings being taken back
in horse-drawn carriages.
William V Stadtholder
had died by this time.
His son, who became King William I,
handed over the entire
collection to the state in 1816,
and since then
what was originally the
Stadtholder's collection
have been a state collection,
the Royal Picture Gallery.
I started in this lecture
talking about the building,
so we're back to the building now.
And I mentioned before
that the Mauritshuis opened its doors
as a museum in 1822.
In the first years,
a large number of paintings
were exhibited there,
but only on one floor.
So, they only used the top floor
for the paintings.
The lower floor was used
to display a natural history collection.
Now, 274 paintings is quite a lot.
When you compare it to today,
we normally hang around
250 in the entire building,
so it must have just
been filled to the brim.
And this King William I
played a really important role
in expanding the collection.
For example, the great View
of Delft by Johannes Vermeer.
He bought it and insisted
it go to his Mauritshuis.
I'm sorry to say that we've
left this one in The Hague.
(laughs) It's very delicate.
It has traveled in the past,
but we've done a little bit
more looking into its condition,
so it's too delicate to
come to the States anymore.
I do encourage you to
come and see this as well.
But it's not just this.
William I bought this
sensational Lamentation of Christ
by Rogier van der Weyden,
which is still the only work
in the Netherlands attributed
to this important artist.
And in 1828, the Mauritshuis
acquired a painting
that has become one of its icons,
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt.
I'm gonna fast-forward a little
bit and tell you something
about one of my illustrious predecessors.
Very big shoes to fill.
This is Mr. Abraham Bredius,
who was appointed Director in 1889.
What's interesting about Bredius is
that he was a qualified art historian
with museum experience and
a broad network of contacts.
So, what happens with Bredius,
he really starts
professionalizing the museum.
Bredius had a great eye
and many connections,
which helped him make great acquisitions.
So, for example, in 1894 he bought this
Portrait of an Unknown Man.
It was put on the market
and he was convinced it was
by the important early
Netherlandish painter Hans Memling.
He turned out to be right,
and in fact there's a wonderful example
of Memling's work here at the Frick.
The following year Bredius
struck it lucky again
by acquiring The Goldfinch
by Carel Fabritius.
Bredius managed this
through an agent acting
on his behalf at a Paris auction.
This painting, which is
also here at the Frick now,
is small in scale.
It's only about this big.
But you can see how it
looks on the screen.
It's monumental in feeling
and is one of our visitors' favorites.
In fact, not only our visitors,
but the writer Donna Tartt
seems to love this painting
as well, because she's
literally just published a novel
in which this plays a central role.
You'll be able to see it here first.
Now, Bredius wasn't just a good collector,
but he had great connections
and he used them to secure loans
which he then lent to the museum,
and he would make good connections also
with private collectors
and encourage them to lend their
masterpieces to the museum.
We're familiar with this idea today,
but at the time it will
have been groundbreaking,
because his idea was
if you have really unique works on loan,
many of which are being shown
to the public for the first time,
it will attract more
visitors to the museum
and ensure the involvement of collectors,
and this in turn often
led to important bequests.
And The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
this is a different way of looking at her.
This is a most sensational example
of a benefactor helping a museum.
The benefactor's name
was Arnoldus des Tombe,
and he bequeathed 12 works to the museum,
including this one, but
that is a story unto itself.
You see, the painting came
up for auction in 1881
in a small auction house in The Hague,
and it was filthy.
No one knew or recognized what it was.
Vermeer was at that time
not the great big name
that he is today.
And this collector, des Tombe,
as well as a prominent art
advisor named Victor de Stuers,
the two of them had spotted the painting.
They discussed it and agreed
not to bid against each other
and managed to buy it for only
two guilders and 30 cents.
This is the equivalent of
about a dollar today. (laughs)
It was cleaned and turned out
to be the fabulous painting
that we know today, but des
Tombe didn't say anything.
It was only when he died in
1913 that it became clear.
He had left the painting
to the Mauritshuis.
Bredius himself made a sizable bequest
which came to the
Mauritshuis after his death,
25 paintings including highlights such as
what you seen onscreen, Rembrandt's Homer
and also Rembrandt's Andromeda.
Bredius by the way
stipulated in his bequest
that all of his paintings
may never leave The Hague,
so they're there right now.
After Bredius departed the
collection continued to grow,
often through good contacts
with private collectors.
During the difficult financial period
between the two World Wars,
Mauritshuis could count
on the generous support
of Sir Henri Deterding, who
donated, among other things,
these two works, the
Woman Writing a Letter
by Gerard ter Borch on the right side
and Jan Steen's Oyster Eater.
Both of these paintings
are in the show here.
You may wonder what happened
during the Second World War.
At the time the most
important paintings were put
into bombproof storerooms
and the collection survived the war
without any serious incident.
The postwar period was very
prosperous for the Mauritshuis.
A huge number of important
acquisitions were made
in the last 70 years,
and I'm certainly not
gonna show them all to you,
but they include
Rembrandt's Self Portrait,
one of only three made during
the last year of his life,
and more recently, also by Rembrandt,
this stunning Portrait of an Old Man,
and this is also in the exhibition
and it is a really marvelous example
of Rembrandt in his later years.
It's in wonderful condition,
and it will really be a treat
for you to look at this.
So, the collection of
the Mauritshuis continues
to be a work in progress,
and I hope you're all
wondering why a museum
with such treasures
continues to buy pictures
when it already has so much.
To my mind, a collection
is like a living animal.
It needs to grow and to be refreshed
in order to remain lively and healthy.
We're always trying to strengthen the core
of the collection and fill
gaps, but it's not that easy
because any acquisition must
meet the very high standards
of the Mauritshuis.
It has to be great quality,
it has to be small in scale
so it looks good in the building,
and it has to hold its own against jewels
like the ones I've shown
you onscreen just now.
Our collection doesn't
strive to be complete.
We're not encyclopedic.
What we do look for is only the best,
and that includes some of the
great masters like Rembrandt,
but we also look for paintings
that are the very best work
by lesser known artists
of the Dutch Golden Age,
and I'm gonna give you a
couple of recent examples.
In 2011 we added this
bouquet by Dirck de Bray
to the collection, and what's
marvelous about this is
that it's very casual in feeling.
It feels almost like an
18th century painting.
In fact, it's very unusual,
because all of the flowers
in the still life actually
bloomed at the same time,
and you almost never see that
in Dutch flower paintings,
which show blossoms that would've come out
in various times of the year.
The bouquet is also not finished,
so it's a really unique piece
and it's in outstanding condition
and really supplements the collection.
We also recently bought
this, a still life painting
by the Flemish woman
painter Clara Peeters.
This, along with The Girl
with a Pearl Earring,
these are the only two paintings
that we regularly refer
to as "she." (laughs)
And our most recent
acquisition was this landscape
by the Flemish artist Paul Brill
who held a very important position
in the development of
Dutch landscape paintings.
Now, the Mauritshuis doesn't
just collect paintings,
but we take care of them as well.
And we have a conservation studio.
It's actually in the
attic of the building.
And our conservators
have an important job.
They keep an eye on the collection,
but they also carry out restoration
and technical investigations
of our painting.
Now, restoration deals with
the way a painting looks,
usually by taking away surface dirt,
old varnish that's discolored with age,
and retouching.
So, it's a paint applied
during a previous restoration.
But these days all restorations are begun
by undertaking a really thorough study
of the painting's treatment
history and condition
and very often also scientific analysis,
and what we're trying to do by that is
to get a really clear
understanding of the work:
how it was made, what's
happened to it over time,
and what we think it
originally looked like.
We only really start treatment
if we think the painting
needs to be stabilized
and we wanna make it
look as good as possible.
But I can assure you
that every treatment we
undertake is reversible,
meaning that the next generation
of conservators can undo
all that work we've done
and make sure that no damage was done.
We also document everything.
And this is a very important part
of the research function of a museum.
And I'm going to tell you,
as a very good example,
something about the treatment
of The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
which was undertaken in 1994.
This is what it looked
like before conservation.
It was stable, but it didn't look great.
It had last been treated in 1960
by the usual restorer at the Mauritshuis,
whose name was Mr. Traas,
and he liked to employ a tinted varnish,
so a varnish with a little
bit of a yellow tone to it,
because at the time people
thought that looked better.
It looked more authentic.
And you can see how very
yellow the painting looks.
It also had a very complicated
network of cracks all over.
This is a drawing actually
that shows you the
cracklier on the painting,
and some of these had been
filled with dark material
and old retouchings,
and it just looked
really patchy and uneven.
So, before beginning the treatment,
our conservators gathered
as much information
about the history of the painting
and examined it in great detail.
And the first thing they
did was they started
to remove the varnish,
and you can see how it's very dramatic.
You can see up here the
varnish is taken away
and you can see the
difference in the color.
And this is done, I
promise you, very safely,
using cotton swabs and
a little bit of solvent,
and it's very painstaking work.
When all the retouchings were removed,
and this is the big shocker
(laughs), traumatic,
this is what it looks
like in a clean state.
It's actually not in horrible condition.
It's actually quite good condition
for a 17th century painting.
This kind of loss is pretty normal.
We also made an X-ray of the painting,
and X-rays turn up the
lead white in the painting,
so they tell us a lot about
there were losses in this area.
And this sort of loss is usually caused
by earlier restorations of pictures;
they were less sophisticated
than they are now,
along with poor conditions
in which the painting would have been kept
before it joined our collection.
The next step is to,
once it's stripped like this
you put a very thin layer
of varnish over it
so that anything you do
subsequently can be reversed,
and that's what you see here.
This is a detail.
You can see there was
a loss around the eye,
and that's filled in very carefully
and then retouched with a new paint,
very soluble and stable
so it won't discolor,
and then voila.
That's what she looks
like with her facelift.
(audience laughs)
And then as a last step, of course,
a layer of varnish was applied
so that we won't have to do
this for a very long time again.
And what you see her is how wonderfully
that Vermeer's bright palette came out,
the reflections in the earrings
and the wonderful details
around her face and her lip.
All the subtlety is visible once again.
Now, this is pretty
standard procedure for us.
There wasn't anything all that unusual
about the way that we
proceeded in the work,
but there were some exceptional things
about this particular restoration.
In the first place, it was done in public,
so we had a conservation studio built
under the forecourt of the museum
and you can see people could look down
and follow the restoration.
We also did some technical research
that turned up many new insights
into Vermeer's materials
and painting techniques,
but one of the most
important findings had to do
with the pearl itself.
Now, this is a detail of the
pearl before restoration.
Can you see there's a highlight
here and there's one here?
I'm just gonna compare it
with the way it looks now.
This highlight turned out
to be a tiny piece of paint
that had been dislodged
in a previous restoration.
It had flipped over and
had landed on the pearl.
The kind of scientific
research that we do determined
that this was not the original intention.
It was carefully removed,
and what you see now
in the newly restored version is the way
that Vermeer would have painted it:
very carefully, very,
well, in a way, very freely
with just a few brushstrokes,
gives you that sense of the reflection
of the light coming from the window,
and also the reflection
from her white collar.
And I think I have one
more slide of the whole
so you can see how perfectly
that illusion works.
So, I've told you now about
the history of the building,
the history of the collection,
and the current state of affairs
in relation to acquisitions
as well as conservation,
so I'm giving you a lot to think about,
but now I'd like to give you even more,
because I want to tell you a little bit
about our plans for the future.
In a way, the Mauritshuis is
a victim of its own success.
In recent years we've been receiving
well over 200,000 visitors a year,
and that's quite a lot for a building
that was originally designed as a house.
What you see here is the
way the Mauritshuis looked.
Until recently the gates to
the forecourt were closed.
The front door is not really usable,
because it's dangerous
for the internal climate.
It's not good for the paintings
to let so much moisture in,
so people used to have to come in
through the side entrance
here, the service entrance.
The Mauritshuis established a very active
and successful exhibition program,
but in order to do
exhibitions we actually had
to move the permanent
collection out of the main areas
in order to accommodate
these temporary shows,
and this is of course not
good for the paintings,
but it also meant that
many of our visitors
who would come from abroad
would actually miss a good part
of the permanent collection.
The Mauritshuis runs a very successful
and innovative education
program for children,
but we had absolutely nowhere to do that,
so we sort of do this before opening hours
or camp in inappropriate spaces.
We had a noisy and crowded cafe.
And the museum stuff actually
worked in a separate building,
so we didn't have the kind of contact
that we would've liked.
So, the situation as of two years ago
was really far from ideal.
We knew this,
but only recently did we find a solution,
and that is this building,
which is right across the
street from the Mauritshuis.
This is a 1930s building.
It's a very good example
of Dutch Art Deco.
It's an extension to this larger building,
which is a private club.
And it had been rented
out as an office building
for some time.
When I started as Director in 2008,
the first we did was
conduct a feasibility study.
Could we actually link this building
to the Mauritshuis itself?
And the answer was yes.
And we had a competition
and the Dutch architect
Hans van Heeswijk won it,
and this is his very elegant design.
I'll just walk you through it briefly.
You can see the Mauritshuis here,
the forecourt with the gates around it,
but the big difference here is
that the gates will be open.
As a visitor, you'll
walk through those gates
and then you'll take a left,
because, as I mentioned before,
the old main door is really not usable
with this number of visitors,
and you'll go down in this
wonderful glass elevator
or the stairs next to it.
You can think about the
Apple Store in Manhattan.
(audience laughs)
You might recall the Louvre.
It's the same idea.
This brings you down into this very light
and large foyer, or atrium.
This is the staging area
for you to go back up
into the city palace.
This building,
I think you'll notice
something different about it.
This is a drawing.
It's not an actual photograph.
But you can see that the
windows have been replaced
with those that look much closer
to the original 17th century design,
but they're also very modern.
They're safe, and they
help protect the paintings
from too much light.
We've also discovered the original color
that the masonry was painted,
and we've gone back to the original color.
The interior of the
building we're also giving
a little bit of a lift.
We're gonna have new wall coverings
and much better modern lighting,
so this part of the
project is really intended
to preserve what's so good
about the Mauritshuis:
that intimate atmosphere,
the wonderful combination of architecture
and of paintings.
The new wing on this side is intended
to support the main event,
so over here we're gonna
have an exhibition space.
Small, not very big, but
big and flexible enough
for us to be able to be inventive
with our exhibition programming.
We're gonna have an auditorium,
like you have a wonderful auditorium here,
but we never had one,
so we couldn't do programming for adults.
It's cutaway, but on the front
we're gonna have a space,
we're gonna call it the Art
Workshop, for art education.
We'll have a library,
and our offices will be on the top floor.
Let's see, I have, this is an image,
again, this is a drawing,
but this is how the
new entrance will look.
You'll come down the
stairs or the elevator,
go through a glass wall.
These are the steps,
and there's also an elevator
into the old city palace.
Here is for tickets,
and beyond that is the shop,
and the new wing on that side.
It's a very elegant design that manages
to unite two completely
dissimilar buildings.
And here again you have
another view of the whole.
This is the entrance here,
the steps and the elevator
up into the renovated city palace,
right through here to the shop
and up into the new wing.
And one last view.
The museum, we've been working
on this for quite awhile,
these plans.
We got all of our financing
and planning permissions
in place on time to start the project
in April of 2012.
All of the paintings have been
moved out of the city palace.
Some of them are in The Hague.
Many of the ones I showed to you earlier,
such as The Anatomy Lesson, The Bull,
the paintings that Bredius bought,
are all on display at the moment,
and this is The Hague Municipal Museum,
the Gemeentemuseum.
It's a fantastic example
of Dutch modernist architecture,
so if you're in The Hague,
in the meanwhile you can come
and enjoy our collection there.
As I mentioned, we started
the building project
on the 4th of June last year,
and this is what it looked
like about a month ago.
You can see the exterior.
The historic palace is
coming along very well.
The underground area's all finished now
and we are starting to
refurbish the new wing.
We are due to reopen
in the middle of 2014,
and I'm delighted to say
that so far we're on schedule
and we're on budget.
And when this project is complete,
the museum will be twice as large,
have modern and up-to-date
visitors' facilities,
but importantly also for the
audience here at the Frick,
it's gonna have the
atmosphere that it deserves,
that small, domestic
atmosphere we will keep.
This project offers many benefits.
It's a lot of extra work,
but it's really worth it.
And one of these is the opportunity
to send important works from
the collection overseas.
An earlier version of the show here
at the Frick was held in Tokyo in 2012,
and we attracted more visitors
than any other exhibition
in the world that year.
From there, a slightly smaller
version of the show went on
to San Francisco and then Atlanta,
where it was very popular as well.
And I have every reason to believe
that lots of people will wanna come
and see our paintings here at the Frick.
For us, we have another idea,
another reason to want to be overseas
in this extraordinary period,
and the best way I can explain
that is by a little story.
When we started our international tour
we had these things made.
I know you can't see them from behind,
but it's a little luggage tag
and it's got a reproduction
of The Girl with a Pearl Earring
and it says "See you" on it
and you can put your address on the back.
Now, of course my husband
is under strict orders
to always have this on his luggage.
(audience laughs)
And he was on a business
trip in the United States
when someone he didn't
know came running up to him
and said, "Oh my God, I know that movie."
(audience laughs)
(Emilie laughs)
That's great,
but that also tells us we
have some work to do. (laughs)
What we really want to be able
to convey is, yes, it's a
movie, but also it's a painting,
and it's a painting that
lives at the Mauritshuis
in The Hague.
And we very much that
when we reopen next year,
you and everyone will come
and see the girl in her
natural habitat at home.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- I share one thing in
common with Emilie's husband.
I too have that tag on my suitcase,
(audience laughs)
which I have since she gave it to me,
a year and half ago or so.
So, Emilie has kindly agreed
to take some questions.
I'm just gonna start with one question.
Has the Prime Minister complained
about the noise of construction?
(audience laughs)
- This is an excellent question.
I'm delighted to tell you
that the Prime Minister
has not complained yet.
The Dutch,
if I may make a horrible generalization,
Dutch people tend to like
to discuss projects like this with you.
They tend to be very
free with their opinions,
and so one of the challenges
with this project is the fact
that it's right by the
Parliament building.
It's very visible, and people tend...
We have a lot of very close friends,
so a lot of people have
an opinion about this,
and I'm delighted to say so far so good.
We've managed to keep open
the lines of communication
and, for example, had no
objections to our building plans
when they were put forward to the public.
There was a question right here.
- [Voiceover] I was
wondering why they didn't
put the entrance in the new building.
- The question was why we
didn't put the entrance
in the new building.
That was in fact our original idea,
but the Dutch state
architect, a wonderful woman,
actually came to us with this comment:
she said, "You know, when
you go to the Mauritshuis,
"you want to go in
towards the main building,
"and if you put the
entrance in the new wing,
"you're gonna walk in with
your back to the Mauritshuis
"and that would be really contradictory
"to the whole experience,"
so that was why we did this.
I should also mention
that both of these
buildings are monuments.
I know New York has tough,
tough monuments rules
and zoning laws.
We have the same thing.
And so, what will happen
in this design is actually
this is the only element that
you will see on the outside
that will be new.
It's transparent.
It's round in form,
so it echoes the Prime Minister's office,
as well as the front of
this building is also round,
and it's meant to look
like kind of a movable
and transparent piece of furniture
that's landed in the forecourt.
Thank you.
- [Voiceover] First of
all, I wanna thank you
for this loan to New York.
I was one of the first people
through the door yesterday
and spent over an hour just
in that one little room
enjoying the pictures.
I had been fortunate
enough to go to The Hague
and spend a day at the
Mauritshuis, which I loved,
and I can't wait to go
back and see it again.
I have a question for you.
The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
those of us who were
in New York at the time
of the Liz Taylor
auction saw La Peregrina,
which is one of the most
largest, magnificent pearls,
which went for $10,000,000,
which is smaller than the pearl earring
on The Girl with a Pearl Earring.
What do you think that earring really is?
- I'll just repeat the question.
We're on podcast now.
Thank you, first of all,
for being one of the
first through the door
and for enjoying our paintings so much.
The question is about the
pearl that the girl wears,
and I'm gonna actually,
I think I can scroll back very quickly
and you can have a good look at her.
Oops, there she is.
This was almost certainly
not a real pearl.
It's too big.
It's an impossibility.
There are two ways we can explain it.
Either it was costume jewelry
that existed at the time.
There were glass earrings
that were made like this.
But another very real possibility is
that Vermeer just made it up.
He was a fantastic artist.
He would have no problem
thinking up a bigger pearl
and making it look very real.
We don't know exactly
which of those two it was.
The other thing that
you should remember is
that The Girl with a Pearl
Earring is not a portrait.
We know that.
It's a type of painting that
was described as a tronie
in the 17th century,
and that's a study of head and shoulders
almost always wearing exotic costume,
and she is in fact wearing a turban,
which was not worn in the 17th century,
so to her contemporaries
she would have been
immediately recognized
as a figure from history
of some sort or another,
so to have a very extra-large
pearl would suit this sort
of exoticism of the image.
I'm sure there are other questions.
Yes?
- [Voiceover] Are you funded
by the state or the country,
and did they help you with the money
or did you have to go out
and have a capital campaign?
- (laughs) This is an excellent question
about the funding of the museum.
It's a slightly complicated
construction that some of you
who know the United
Kingdom might recognize.
We are a private foundation.
I answer to a board.
But our mandate is to care for
and display the
government's art collection
and the government's building.
As a consequence, we do receive subsidy,
half of which goes back to the government
in the form of rent,
and the other half, yeah,
(audience laughs)
and the other half is
intended for the care
of the collection.
We are one of the more
entrepreneurial Dutch museums.
We're a state museum.
Many Dutch museums are
city museums or provincial,
but we're one of the 29 state museums.
Of that group, we earn
a very large percentage
of our own income, roughly 50%.
Some of that comes from ticket sales,
some of it from sponsoring,
some of it from private donors.
And this is a challenging moment for us,
because the subsidy has been cut
and the economy is not
in the greatest shape
in the Netherlands.
That having been said, we dived into this,
or dove into this
(laughs) building project
in spite of the economic climate.
The expansion part we
are funding ourselves,
and the funding for that came out to
about 22.7 million euros,
a substantial amount of money.
We raised that on our own,
and that's a combination of money
from the wonderful Dutch lottery,
the (speaks in Dutch).
We have corporate sponsoring.
We received a little extra
subsidy from the state,
European Union, foundation,
from all over the place.
The city palace is actually state property
and they are paying for the
necessary renovations there,
with the exception of lighting.
What's very unusual about this is that we,
the Mauritshuis, are
actually project managing
that part of the project.
We're the first Dutch state museum
to run the building project ourselves.
It's a real challenge to someone like me.
I'm an art historian,
but, you know, with good
advice, which I certainly have,
and lots of support, it's going very well.
Thank you.
There's another question.
- [Voiceover] What part of your
collection do you not show?
- Question is what part of
our collection do we not show.
This is a very frequently asked question.
This is, as I mentioned earlier,
a collection of about 800 paintings.
When we reopen about 250
will be in the Mauritshuis,
about 150 in our gallery.
We have over 100 out on permanent loan.
So, at any given time about 2/3
of the collection is on display somewhere.
You always, as a museum, need
a little bit of a reserve.
We're generous lenders
to outside exhibitions,
so you need some pieces in
reserve to replace them.
We've got a few works on paper.
They're too delicate to
be shown all the time.
So, a good deal of the collection is out
and what's in store is
there for a good reason.
Thank you.
- [Voiceover] I understand
that the exhibit was larger
before it came here.
What are we missing out on?
(audience laughs)
(Emilie laughs)
- The exhibition that was
traveling first in Japan
included some Flemish paintings
which came back to us after that tour.
The exhibitions in San
Francisco and Atlanta had more
than 35 in total, so 20 other paintings.
There were more landscapes.
Actually, the selection here is wonderful
because it gives you sort of
the best of every single genre,
so you're really getting
the full experience.
But it was just sort of
more of what you see here.
I think, ladies and gentlemen,
that it's time to stop.
So, thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
