It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on 5 August 2017.
Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann was born in the Netherlands in 1923. In his early years he worked as Curator of Drawings – and later paintings – at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. In 1959 he moved to the United States, a year after receiving his PhD from the University of Utrecht under the supervision of J.G. van Gelder, and spent one year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. He then joined the faculty of Yale University, where he taught art history and was responsible for the prints and drawings collection. In 1978 he joined the Institute of Fine Arts in New York and was named John Langeloth Loeb Professor. For several years he concurrently held the position of Curator of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At Yale Haverkamp-Begemann met Michael Montias, whom he encouraged to study Vermeer and the art market during the Dutch republic. Over the course of years, Haverkamp-Begemann had many notable students, among them Ronni Baer, Alan Chong, Stephanie Dickey, Wayne Franits, Emilie Gordenker, Thomas Kren, Otto Naumann, Nanette Salomon, Joaneath Spicer, Peter Sutton, and Mariët Westerman.
Haverkamp-Begemann was the author of many publications, including books and articles on Rembrandt and Hecules Seghers, Willem Buytewech (1959), and a volume dedicated to the Achilles Series in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (1975). He served as the general editor for the fourteen volumes of scholarly catalogues of the Robert Lehman Collection.
Several publications have been published in Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann’s honor. In 1983 a festschrift was published for his sixtieth birthday and in 1998 an issue of Master Drawings (vol. 36, no. 1) honored Haverkamp-Begemann for serving on its editorial board for 35 years. More recently, the Historians of Netherlandish Art dedicated an issue of the JHNA to Haverkamp-Begemann in 2012 (vol. 5:2). In addition to excerpts from an interview with him discussing his life as a scholar, curator, and teacher, the issue includes a list of his publications and several essays by his former students.
Our thoughts are with Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann’s family and friends.
See also the obituaries in The New York Times and on the Delineavit et Sculpsit website.