To mark CODART’s 25th anniversary, in 2023 the Friends of CODART Foundation finances one Curators Stipend via the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds (PBCF). We are pleased to announce that after deliberation by the selection committee of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the stipend has been awarded to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, for the purpose of research for a publication and exhibition about the Utrecht painter Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656). The stipend enables the museum to hire a junior curator for the duration of six months, in which senior curator Liesbeth M. Helmus can devote herself to research and can receive support from the junior. At the same time, the junior curator is enabled to gain experience working in a museum. He or she will be offered membership of CODART for the duration of the employment.

As the international network of museum curators of Dutch and Flemish art before 1800, CODART aims to support the curator in making this widespread cultural heritage more visible and accessible to an international public. The main task of the curator is to carry out and maintain the intellectual care for objects within a museum’s collection. Due to the growing number of responsibilities of museum curators, this often receives less attention than it should. At the same time, young art historians and junior curators struggle to find opportunities to gain experience in museums. The Curators Stipend was launched in 2013 by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds to aid in this situation. The Friends of CODART Foundation is pleased and proud to be able to offer one extra stipend this year. In this pilot in collaboration with PBCF only museums in the Netherlands were eligible for application. We strive to establish other partnerships to make comparable stipends available to museums and curators outside of the Netherlands as well.

About the Honthorst research project

Honthorst was one of the most successful painters of the seventeenth century.  A trio of dissertations have been published on the artist (1959, 1966 and 2019), a complete oeuvre catalogue (1999) and numerous articles. There is a book in Italian on his period in Rome and a catalogue, also in Italian, on the occasion of the 2014-15 exhibition at the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. In spring 2026, ten years after the only exhibition ever held on Honthorst, the Centraal Museum will realize the exhibition The World of Gerard van Honthorst (working title). This major retrospective will be accompanied by a scholarly publication by Liesbeth Helmus. It will be an overarching study on the painter, combining archive documents and data on his personal life with his successful painting career. The study is intended for all readers interested in art and cultural history.