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Donors, friends and guests with a privilege pass may book a single or multiple time slots here
Donors, friends and guests with a privilege pass may book a single or multiple time slots here

Tickets

Join as a Friend

Would you also like to experience more Boijmans or give a friendship as a gift? Join as a Friend and get invited for the annual Museumpark Vriendendag. Will we see you or your friend in the depot soon?

Word vriend
Read aloud

Hidden Treasures

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection contains more than 154,000 objects; 88,000 of them are prints and drawings. In this column members of the museum’s staff choose their favourite artworks, now still hidden behind closed doors, but soon to be seen in the depot. This time Peter van der Coelen and Albert Elen, curators of the Print Room, take their pick.

The Dutch name ‘Prentenkabinet’ derives from a piece of furniture, a wooden cupboard (‘kabinet’ in old Dutch) in which a collector kept his fragile prints or drawings. Print cabinets gave their owners considerable private pleasure. A collector could sit by the window and take time to look at his sheets one by one. This was perhaps the most intimate way of enjoying art. Eventually, many of these private collections were sold or donated to museums – like Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Our print room is one of the world’s most renowned, with drawings and prints by such artists as Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt and Goya. The entire collection is going to the new depot, including these hidden treasures chosen by the curators.

Dutch Printmaking
Lucas van Leyden, ‘Young Man with a Skull’, c. 1519.

Dutch Printmaking

Lucas van Leyden was the godfather of Netherlandish printmaking. His refined technique and surprising subjects saw the medium, which had long existed, flourish for the first time in the Low Countries. When Lucas made this ‘Young Man with a Skull’ he was in his mid-twenties. It was once thought that it could have been a self-portrait. Nowadays we think it more likely that it is an anonymous type. Not a dull chap, to judge by his hat – but someone who is reflecting on the transience of our existence. Good quality impressions of Lucas’s prints were already rare in his own time. Art lovers and collectors have admired them throughout the centuries, among them the surgeon Johan Bierens de Haan, who bequeathed his print collection to the museum in 1951. Bierens de Haan also gifted a large sum of money for new purchases of prints. That money was lodged in a fund with an appropriate name: the Lucas van Leyden Foundation.

Print Album
Pembroke Album, 328 prints, compiled by Thomas Herbert, c. 1683-1733.

Print Album

Our prints and drawings are listed alphabetically by the artists’ names. All print rooms have been doing this since the nineteenth century. The sheets are carefully fixed on acid-free mounts and stored in boxes. The approach in the past was very different, as we see in this extraordinary album. It was put together in the early eighteenth century by Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and contains 328 prints by artists from different schools and times, with no notion of order at all. The sheets were glued into the album. We were able to acquire the Pembroke Album from an English dealer some years ago. We are breaking new ground with purchases like this. As well as collecting masterpieces and great names, we also want to show what functions prints had in the past. How they were collected, used and looked at. What you discover every time is the enormous impact prints had on visual culture. Before the advent of photography, this art form was the ideal medium for distributing images in quantity. In that sense it was the first step towards our digital era with its unrestricted access to photos and images.

Daniël Kerkhoff, ‘The Corn Post-Mill of Huizen in the Gooi Region’, 1815.
Daniël Kerkhoff, ‘The Corn Post-Mill of Huizen in the Gooi Region’, 1815.
Lucas van Leyden, ‘Young Man with a Skull’, c. 1519.
Lucas van Leyden, ‘Young Man with a Skull’, c. 1519.
Pembroke Album, 328 prints, compiled by Thomas Herbert, c. 1683-1733.
Pembroke Album, 328 prints, compiled by Thomas Herbert, c. 1683-1733.
Italian Drawings
Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Leda and the Swan’, c. 1504-06.

Italian Drawings

Last year the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles granted the museum €280,000. Over the next three years the money will be used to carry out scholarly research into the collection of early Italian drawings (1400-1600) and its results will be published at the end of the project. Our collection of Italian drawings is world famous, not so much in terms of size, but because of the exceptional quality. For instance, we own the drawing ‘Leda and the Swan’, the only autograph artwork by Leonardo da Vinci in the Netherlands. The subject is taken from Greek mythology: the king of the gods Zeus disguised himself as a swan and seduced the mortal woman Leda. This drawing was shown in the recent Leonardo exhibition in Teylers Museum, and at the end of this year it will travel to Paris for the great exhibition in the Louvre to mark the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death. A wonderful advertisement for our museum.

Dutch Drawings
Daniël Kerkhoff, ‘The Corn Post-Mill of Huizen in the Gooi Region’, 1815.

Dutch Drawings

One of my [curator Albert Elen, red.] favourite artists is my ancestor Jan Hulswit (1766-1822); we have thirty-eight of his drawings in the collection. Since 1985 I have published various articles about his work. One was about a drawing by Hulswit, now in Paris (in the Fondation Custodia), which was known as ‘landscape with mill’. I discovered a splendid drawing by Daniël Kerkhoff (1766-1821) in our own print room. It has the same composition with a post-mill on a hill and has an annotation on the back that reads ‘te Huizen in het Goiland. D: Kerkhoff 1815’. The artists were contemporaries and good friends. In summer Kerkhoff and Hulswit went out together now and then to draw ‘picturesque spots’. At home in Amsterdam they completed some of those drawings for sale. They sometimes drew exactly the same place, where they sat just a few metres apart. We can see this here too. Thanks to the information from Kerkhoff’s drawing we now also know the precise location and date of Hulswit’s drawing: Huizen, 1815.

Depot Journal

This article has been published before in Depot Journal #2 which is part of a series of six. If you would like to receive all the printed Depot journals by post, please send an email to info@boijmans.nl with your full name and address, reference ‘receive Depot Journals’.