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

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is celebrating the addition to its permanent collection of a prized work by Maria van Oosterwijck, one of the leading Dutch women painters of the Golden Age. The painting, Vanitas Still Life (around 1690)—featuring a human skull as a memento of human mortality and of the worthlessness of worldly goods—has been placed in the museum’s gallery of honour. It takes its place in a sequence of spaces containing masterpieces by Johann Vermeer, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Rembrandt, and concluding with the gallery devoted to the last-named’s celebrated Night Watch (1642).

“Paintings by Maria van Oosterwijck are exceptionally rare because of the limited body of work that she left to posterity,” the museum’s general director, Taco Dibbits, said in a statement. “Only some 30 works by the artist have survived to the present day... We are delighted that, with this painting, we can offer her the place of honour that she deserves.”

Van Oosterwijck was a noted figure in the second half of the 17th century, admired for the quality of her flower paintings, and patronised by many of Europe’s rulers, including Emperor Leopold I of Austria (another vanitas painting by Van Oosterwijck, of 1668, is in the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna); the British co-monarchs William and Mary (two floral still lifes by Van Oosterwijck from the Royal Collection are on show at Kensington Palace, in London); Cosimo III de' Medici in Florence; and the Sun King himself, Louis XIV.

Following two years of research and restoration, the painting was unveiled—adjacent to the artist’s 1671 portrait by Wallerant Vaillant, in which she carries palette and brushes in one hand as she turns the pages of a Bible with the other—on 4 March, the day of the fourth annual Women in the Museum symposium at the Rijksmuseum. The symposium was attended by researchers and curators from institutions including the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, in London, and the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It has been held since 2022, in the week of International Women’s Day, by the Women of the Rijksmuseum research project, which has been devoted since 2021 to increasing the visibility of women in the collection and its gallery display. That work has been funded since 2022 by the Women of the Rijksmuseum Fund, with Chanel Arts & Culture joining the project in 2023 as a partner of the Women of the Rijksmuseum research project and as supporter of the annual symposium, research on female stories and related acquisitions.

The Women of the Rijksmuseum project employs seven young researchers and has overseen the acquisition of works by artists including Van Oosterwijck’s contemporaries Gesina ter Borch, Aleijda Wolfsen, Maria Sibylla Merian and Johanna Koerten; the French romantic novelist George Sand; Thèrése Schwartze, the favourite portraitist of Dutch 19th-century high society; and the US contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems. It has also supported exhibitions including Barbara Hepworth in the Rijksmuseum Gardens (2022), Women on Paper (2022-2023) and Carrie Mae Weems: Painting the Town (until 9 June).

A 'visual sermon'

The acquisition of Vanitas Still Life in 2023 from a private collector—when it became one of only two examples of the artist’s work in Dutch institutional collections (the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, has a Flowers in an Ornamental Vase of around 1670-75)—was made possible through support from the Friends’ Lottery (Vriendenloterij) and the Women of the Rijksmuseum Fund.

Jenny Reynaerts, the senior curator of paintings and chair of the Women of the Rijksmuseum, tells The Art Newspaper that Friso Lammertse, the museum’s curator of 17th-century art, who oversaw the acquisition, refers to the painting as a “visual sermon”. The list of references from Christian scripture that hangs off the front of the marble tabletop on which the still life is arranged, Reynaerts says, “provide the key” to the objects in the painting which symbolise the Biblical concept of vanitas, including a pocket watch, a Bible and two tablets bearing the Ten Commandments.

But the painting contains symbols not just of religious devotion, Reynaerts says, for which the artist was famous, but also of her professional honours. There is a miniature portrait with a large pendant pearl, near the table’s edge, of the Empress of Austria (once thought to be a self-portrait of the artist). The empress and her husband, Emperor Leopold I, were the artist’s clients for the earlier vanitas canvas now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum collection. The imperial miniature and the rings and pearl necklace in the jewelbox at the left foreground of the painting represent tokens of esteem from Van Oosterwijck's royal clientele, Reynaerts says.

The restoration process revealed that the artist had made many changes during the painting process. An hourglass—a symbol of the passing of time that is present in the Vienna vanitas—was at some point painted out, as was a snake. The artist also altered, Reynaerts says, the dialogue or tension between the sunflower and the skull, which face each other across the canvas.

The Women of the Rijksmuseum research project

The Women of the Rijksmuseum project was launched in 2021, but the incentive, Reynaerts says, came from 2019, before the global pandemic, when a journalist approached all Dutch museums, in connection with International Women's Day, to ask how many women artists these institutions held. “Like almost all the other museums,” Reynaerts says, “we didn't have the numbers.” The museum embarked on a research process, which Reynaerts was asked to set up, “and I lovingly did it because it's a subject that's really dear to my heart”. In 2022 the museum launched the Women of the Rijksmuseum Fund. The following year, Chanel joined as a partner, supporting both the research programme and its annual symposium, “which was great” Reynaerts says, “because they have this mission of diversity and inclusion in the museum world … and that's our common purpose”.

In London, meanwhile, the National Portrait Gallery is working with the Chanel Culture Fund on Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, a three-year project designed to redress the balance of female representation in the collection. Almost half (48%) of the total portraits on display in the gallery made after 1900 now feature women, up from one-third in 2020. As part of that project, the Pop Art pioneer Jann Haworth and her daughter Liberty Blake created Work in Progress (2021-22), a seven-panel collage mural depicting 130 inspiring women, which has spurred additional commissions for Haworth and Blake’s ongoing series including an additional set of panels made for this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.

The first public-facing project at the Rijksmuseum, in 2021, was to place women artists in the gallery of honour, marking the first occasion that women had featured in the space since the foundation of the museum in 1885. Three paintings by women artists were installed, along with the Vaillant portrait of Van Oosterwijck. That presence has been maintained and rotated in the gallery in succeeding years, always with a view to quality and to debates about tokenism.

In exploring the legacies of women in Dutch history and to what extent they are visible in the Rijksmuseum collection, Reynaerts and her colleagues have set up three pillars of research. The first is the gathering of information on female artists in their collection. The second is to study women’s historical presence. “We have a lot of women who we know only as the wife of, the daughter of, or the mother of,” Reynaerts says. “And they all have their own story, but nobody ever asked about it. And we have found that if you delve into the archives, information is fairly easy to find on what these women did or what they were.” The third is the Rijksmuseum's own institutional history.

“There have been women working in the museum for a long time,” Reynaerts says. Within that category are female donors, whose identity was often concealed behind their husband's name when “often it turns out they are the collectors or the curators of a family heritage which was then left to the museum”.

A collaboration that the project ran with the University of Amsterdam, called “The Wife Of”, yielded insights into 17th-century Dutch history. “We have all these portraits,” Reynaerts says. “You know, a man: you know his name, you know his title, his function, his dates. And then there is the label of the woman, and she's the wife of this man … we can do better than that. So the Rijksmuseum project team engaged with the students to bring out the life stories of these women and learnt that they were sometimes the wife of the brewer, the wife of the printer, … and that they were not only the wife. These were partnerships.”

“These women were very active in society”, Reynaerts says. Their lives serve, she adds, as a counter to the received “19th-century point of view—of woman at home, husband at work”, that has traditionally been projected on to the history of the 17th century.

An object-first focus

At this year’s Women in the Museum symposium, titled Fabric of Fame: Materiality versus the canon, the focus was not on the subject of untold stories, or overlooked lives, Reynaerts says, but on objects. As a way of “widening” the narrative beyond “starting with the names” of overlooked women.

The keynote was given by Hélène Delalex, the heritage curator at the Château de Versailles, who is involved in the exhibition Marie Antoinette Style opening at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in September, and spoke on Marie Antoinette’s influence on decorative arts in the 18th century. The proceedings questioned why people speak of “Louis Quatorze” or “Louis Seize” style, Reynaerts says, when “it was the women who were the style icons”. But, looking at the period through objects, Reynaerts adds, shows that Marie Antoinette—who had a detailed say in organising how the royal apartments were arranged, something that Delalex revealed, based on recent research at Versailles—had her own stamp put on the furniture she designed.

The symposium looked at decorative arts and prints as examples of genres often made by collectives. In many cases names had historically been “left out or overwritten or deemed not important”, Reynaerts says. She cites the example of the late-11th-century Bayeux Tapestry, where it is known that it was made by “famous English embroiderers”. History does not record their individual names but the collective and the monastery they were based at is known. “The story has always focused on the story of William the Conqueror and Harold. So starting from the art object or the historical object widens the field.”

Reynaerts stresses the importance of taking the time to identify names within collectives. She mentions a late-18th-century desk in the Rijksmuseum collection, with inlaid Wedgwood panels, in porcelain. “There were women in the Wedgwood factory who made these. We know their names. We even know the name of the person who made the plaques in our furniture.”

“So we mention them,” Reynaerts says. “It's sometimes that easy.”

• Carrie Mae Weems: Painting the Town, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 9 June