Exhibiting Female Donors: How Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is Recovering Overlooked Contributions to the Collection
Private donations have always been of vital importance to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection. Male donors have been well documented: two of them are credited in the museum’s name, besides which a study of male donors was published on the museum’s 150th anniversary in 1999. However, roughly one in ten objects was donated by a woman. Over the last five years, as part of a collaborative research project, we have discovered the names of 556 female donors of paintings, drawings, decorative arts, and design from 1864 to the present day. The research will be presented to the public in the form of an exhibition and a publication in 2027. Case studies of the most significant donors will explore their reasons for donating items and their networks in the city of Rotterdam. This paper discusses the processing of new data into a scholarly publication and the exhibition as a space in which the workings of the museum and its institutional histories take priority over traditional art-historical approaches.

Anne-Linde Ruiter

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Anne-Linde Ruiter is Researcher at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. With support from the Vereniging Rembrandt (thanks to their Ekkart Fonds) and the Bröcker Fonds, she has spent the past year researching the lives, backgrounds, and motivations of five female donors in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s history. Her case studies will be published in Boijmans Studies, the museum’s scholarly journal. Previously, she was a Prof. J.C.M. Warnsinck Fellow at The Dutch National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, where she researched the iconography of seventeenth-century portraits of admirals’ and captains’ wives.