THE RIJKSMUSEUM BULLETIN
volume 72 (2024), no. 4
CONTENTS AND ABSTRACTS

‘As a Token of Appreciation for her Dauntless Struggle…’: The Many Portraits of Aletta Jacobs by Isaac Israels
MINEKE BOSCH

In this article, Mineke Bosch links art historical objects and interpretations to historical documents associated with the women’s movement in the Netherlands. Her focus is on a portrait of the prominent feminist Aletta Jacobs by the impressionist painter Isaac Israels. After the suffrage bill passed in 1919, the portrait was commissioned by the Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht to honour its president, with the implicit objective that the portrait be accepted into the collection of a national museum, i.e. the Rijksmuseum. Israels made five substantial portraits and two sketches of Jacobs, before finalizing one formal portrait. On the instigation of the minister of Art and Sciences, however, the Rijksmuseum turned down the offer, probably for political reasons. Open questions that remain are: why was Israels chosen to paint the portrait of Aletta Jacobs? Why did he produce such a large number of portraits and why in so many different poses? And why was this not noticed until only very recently? A key concept in answering these questions is gender: how notions about women and men have influenced the way in which portraits of women and men were painted, the dissimilarity in how their portraits have been used, and also whether, and if so, in what way(s), a woman like Aletta Jacobs has been integrated into the Dutch collective memory.

herman de vries, random objectivation v67-36c: Ecology as Context of Systematic Artwork
CEES DE BOER AND ROB DE WINDT

In its collection of twentieth-century art, the Rijksmuseum holds several works by the artist herman de vries. Among them is an exceptional white wall relief from 1967 measuring more than six metres across, on long-term loan from Wageningen University & Research random objectivation v67-36c was created as an art commission for the then newly built accommodation of the Instituut voor Toegepast Biologisch Onderzoek in de Natuur (ITBON), where de vries was working as a research assistant at the time. The relief belongs to an extensive series of artworks de vries called random objectivations, conceived on the basis of mathematical tables of objective-random numbers used by de vries in conducting biological experiments and subsequent evaluations. As revealed by the authors’ research in the ITBON archives, the nature of de vries’s scientific activities during these years centred on the study of ecological networks, an approach first developed in the late nineteen twenties as a new paradigm in the field of biology. By examining the scientific context in which de vries’s relief was created, the authors arrive at a more focused interpretation and ecological contextualization of de vries’s random objectivations.

Short notice
Tracing Willem Kick: A Collaborative Journey in Reconstructing Seventeenth-Century Imitation Lacquer
MICHÈLE SEEHAFER AND JAN DORSCHEID

As there is often a tendency for the knowledge of surface perception and material processes to become lost amidst written art historical sources and analytical results, joining the expertise of art history and art conservation proved invaluable in the interpretation of the appreciation of the lacquer caskets of Willem Kick (1579-1647). A reconstruction gave valuable insights into art-technological processes and shed further light on Kick’s workshop practice, bringing us closer to understanding the original state and appreciation of his works and of the objects now on display in the Rijksmuseum.

Recent Acquisitions: Dutch History
STEPHANIE ARCHANGEL, JEROEN TER BRUGGE, JAN PELSDONK, EVELINE SINT NICOLAAS AND HARM STEVENS