The Rijksmuseum announced that Jane Turner has retired from the museum on 1 November 2020. Turner, a member of CODART since 2010, has headed the Print Room of the Rijksmuseum for more than nine years, where she has led the department’s curators and researchers.

Jane Turner is a specialist in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch drawings. She studied art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Before coming to the Rijksmuseum, she worked for the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and for Macmillan Publishers in London, where she coordinated and edited the 34-volume standard work The Dictionary of Art. Turner has dozens of publications to her name, including the collection catalogues of Dutch drawings in the Morgan Library & Museum (2006) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2014).

One of the most unusual exhibitions that Turner conceived for the Rijksmuseum was Frans Post. Animals in Brazil, produced in partnership with Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. The combination of drawings and stuffed animals was a great success with families with children. Still in the pipeline is the exhibition XXL Paper, about the largest works on paper in the Print Room collection. This exhibition will open in the summer of 2021.

Turner also developed the online collection catalogue of seventeenth-century Dutch drawings at the Rijksmuseum. The entries for the Rembrandt drawings are already online in Rijksstudio, but many others are to follow. This project will continue after Jane’s retirement and she will continue to be involved as a volunteer.

Until a new head of the Print Room is appointed, the position will be held by Erik Hinterding and Ilona van Tuinen.