When I was a young boy, we lived in a neighbourhood where the streets were named after painters. Our own house was in Jan Mankeshof, and when I started kindergarten, at four years of age, the one road I had to cross was called Govert Flinckstraat. Many years later, I became an art historian. Later this year I hope to be defending my PhD thesis on Govert Flinck and publishing the monograph I have worked on for the last 15 years. That may make it sound as if my career was written in the stars. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I seemed destined to be a doctor, and went to medical school at the age of 18. Although I gained my degree, I gradually became aware that medicine was not my vocation. I had a wide range of interests, and my travels around Europe in my student years had really ignited love of history and art. So, although I had a year left before graduation, I enrolled as an art history student at the University of Amsterdam.

Tom van der Molen (with Govert Flinck in the background)

At the end of my art history studies, Govert Flinck crossed my path again. I attended a course given by Marten Jan Bok where I focused on Rembrandt’s painting production and his main rivals in the Amsterdam art market. One of these rivals was Flinck, who intrigued me: he appeared to have been admired far more by his contemporaries than by modern art historians. Marten Jan introduced me to Norbert Middelkoop, who needed help at the Amsterdam Museum producing his catalogue of paintings before 1800 and the related exhibition Old Masters of Amsterdam in 2009. This led to a position at CODART, where I worked for years, succeeding Gary Schwartz as webmaster before returning to the Amsterdam Museum in 2013.

The Amsterdam Museum is a city museum with a remarkably fine art collection. It manages the historical collection of the municipality of Amsterdam. Its highlights include group portraits of civic militias, regents and regentesses, portraits of Amsterdam citizens, and cityscapes by virtually all the city’s best-known painters. The collection already built up by the municipality was enormously enriched by donations from nineteenth-century collectors such as Adriaan van der Hoop, Carel Joseph Fodor, and Piet van Eeghen. Van der Hoop’s collection – most of which has been on loan to the Rijksmuseum for almost 150 years – consists of masterpieces from seventeenth-century painting. Carel Joseph Fodor donated what were for him contemporary, nineteenth-century paintings, besides which he had a world-class collection of prints and drawings by numerous early modern artists, including Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Goltzius. Van Eeghen’s donation include his huge Luyken collection, with over 12,000 prints, approximately 1,150 drawings, and 1,000 book bindings. As a result, the Amsterdam Museum has in its care the largest Luyken collection in the world.

Working in a municipal museum with a collection with this range means my job is extremely varied. I certainly have the opportunity to conduct art-historical research, but in a municipal museum, even more than in an art museum, it is essential to view the artworks from different perspectives – not just within an art historical context. We need to view them as historical objects, taking account of the diversity of visitors to the museum, and as objects that convey moral and ethical messages. I will give a few examples below.

A hidden sketch by Van Dyck

The collection of drawings donated to the city by Fodor in 1860 includes a Crowning with Thorns by Anthony van Dyck, a preliminary study for paintings in the Prado in Madrid and formerly in Berlin (lost during the Second World War). In 2021, research conducted by the paper restorer Françoise Richard showed that there must be another drawing on the back of the sheet. Since the sheet is lined, this had not been noticed before. Together with Mike Hermsen (who was then working as an intern and who wrote a blog about it in Dutch here), we decided we wanted to make that drawing visible. We placed the drawing on a light box and photographed it, after which we used Photoshop to remove the lines that were visible on the front, one by one. The result – though certainly not an exact reproduction of the pen-and-ink sketch on the back of the sheet, provides an idea of what it looked like.

The image on the other side of the sheet is another Crowning with Thorns, part of a search for the most satisfying composition, which is also visible on other drawings of this subject by Van Dyck. This may cautiously be described as the least highly elaborated version of all the preliminary studies. Possibly it only served to elaborate the composition of the figures in relation to each other.

Adopting different perspectives

Of the four paintings by Rembrandt in the possession of the municipality, three have been on loan to the Rijksmuseum since the nineteenth century. One was returned in the 1990s: the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman – a fragment of a group portrait. The painting hangs in the section of our exhibition entitled Panorama Amsterdam. The aim of this section is to convey to visitors that there is no neutral way of viewing art objects (or historical stories), but that much depends on who you are and your own particular interests.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman, 1656
Amsterdam Museum

So, in the case of Rembrandt’s painting, we look at it in depth from a number of different perspectives, of which the art-historical approach is simply one. We explain to visitors that the painting is a fragment – the rest having perished in a fire in 1721 – and that the foreshortening of the body, which is almost perpendicular to the painted surface, has been executed with consummate skill. From a historical perspective, we discuss the annual anatomy demonstrations that were staged for the benefit of surgeons, which this painting depicts.

View of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson as seen from the laboratory

In an area in the middle of the exhibition hall you get a very different view of the painting. Rather than focusing on Rembrandt or the surgeons, there we shift our attention to the dead body that is displayed so prominently in the painting. We know that it is the body of Joris Fonteijn (1633/34-1656). With the help of archival documents, we tell his story: after serving as a sailor on several voyages with the West India Company, he ended up pursuing a life of crime in the Dutch Republic. He was arrested in Amsterdam at the age of 23 and convicted of burglaries and threatening people with a pistol, for which he was sentenced to death. After his public execution outside city hall at Dam Square, his body was given to the surgeons to be used for an anatomy lesson. The painting was intended to depict the transfer of scientific knowledge and to immortalize those portrayed (except for Fonteijn) as the joint embodiment of that scientific ambition. But none of this affects the visitors who gaze at it today in the same way. The responses range from fascination to revulsion when confronted with the man who lies there on a table with his abdominal and thoracic cavities gaping while two hands hold up a membrane between the two halves of his brain. What is more, as soon as you know the background, the prominent corpse poses an ethical dilemma. Do you actually want to look at an image of a young man who was executed and whose body was then subjected to a public dissection? It does not make it any easier that the gruesome scene was painted by Rembrandt.

For me, and hopefully for our visitors too, all those layers and meanings that an artwork may have combine to make our experience of that work richer and more significant. Moreover, you can choose. If you consider the foreshortening of the body the most important thing about the painting, you can decide to ignore the other elements.

After all, what artworks mean to us will differ from one person to the next. In my capacity as curator of the Amsterdam Museum, I am happy that I am challenged to explore many of those meanings. These multiple perspectives enable us to ensure that those beautiful old works of art retain a relevance that goes far beyond their beauty.

Tom van der Molen is curator at the Amsterdam Museum in Amsterdam. He has been a member of CODART since 2014.