Femke Diercks

On 13 April 2013 the Rijksmuseum reopened to the public. In its new display, paintings, history and the decorative arts are more integrated than ever before. While for most CODART members, visiting the paintings exhibited will be renewing old acquaintances, this probably applies less to the decorative arts. This lecture will discuss the history of a number of fields within the decorative arts collection of the Rijksmuseum. It will focus on the institutional and more especially the private founders of these collections and collecting areas, and on the exhibition histories of these groups of objects.

Johannes Lutma (1584-1669), Salt cellars, 1639, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

About Femke Diercks

Femke Diercks (b. 1984) gained her master’s degree with distinction from the University of Groningen with a thesis on the collection of the Amsterdam regents’ family Backer (on loan from Amsterdam Museum). She worked as an intern at several institutions including the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
From 2009 to 2011 Diercks worked as junior curator of decorative arts at the Rijksmuseum, where she primarily conducted research for the publication Paris 1650-1900: Decorative Arts in the Rijksmuseum. After a brief period at Museum De Lakenhal, she returned to the Rijksmuseum in 2012 as junior curator of Ceramics and Glass. Among her other activities there, she has been closely involved in the museum’s restructuring of the glass and ceramics collections.

The opening of the Rijksmuseum on 13 April 2013