The Frans Hals Museum announced the appointment of Christi Klinkert as Senior Curator of Old Masters, starting in February. She succeeds Norbert Middelkoop, who will return to work in full for the Amsterdam Museum after a three-year secondment.
Curating at the Frans Hals Museum is a dream come true for Christi, she said in a statement. “The collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings is of the highest international level – I consider it a great privilege to be able to work with it.” Christi is already familiar with some of the works in the collection since they were created by masters who were born or worked in Alkmaar, such as Caesar and Allart van Everdingen and Maarten van Heemskerck.
Christi Klinkert studied at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and received her PhD there. She then worked at the Rijksmuseum before joining the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar as a curator in 2009. There she organized several exhibitions on old masters who worked in Alkmaar, such as Caesar van Everdingen (2016-2017), Allart van Everdingen (2021-2022), and on other topics related to the city, such as Plantage Alkmaar in Surinam (2022-2023) and an exhibition on the memorial book of the Alkmaar Maria van Nesse (2022-2023). She supervised the restoration of several large militia paintings, and also managed to add important objects to the collection, including paintings by Salomon van Ruysdael and Emanuel de Witte. She has been a member of CODART since 2009 and currently serves on the Board of the Friends of CODART Foundation, having previously chaired the CODART Website Committee.