Great and fantastic art, slavery and colonialism. How to understand and appreciate the Old Masters? by Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague

Times change. We read paintings differently to the way we did a few decades ago. How has this revolution come about in understanding the Old Masters from a new perspective? What do we see now that we didn't see before? Why does this revolution annoy some people and why do others have doubts about continuing to admire the Old Masters? 

Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 2020, will be giving a lecture in the museum's Auditorium with the aim of discussing these and other issues in the context of the exhibition Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections. 

Gosselink (born 1969, the Netherlands) has focused her professional activities on the field of culture, particularly the museum sector. In 1995 she graduated in Art History from the University of Amsterdam as a student of the great Rembrandt expert Ernst van de Wetering. That same year she founded her first company, Art & Culture, which offered art-historical consultancy and research. She later co-founded the collective De Nieuwe Collectie, working for museums in the Netherlands, New York, Iran, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and South Africa. Between 2009 and 2020 she was head of the History Department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, responsible for the museum's historical programming, devoting herself to research on looted art, the provenance of the museum's colonial collections, and the changing terminology and interpretation of the collection from multiple perspectives. Martine Gosselink has written several books on 17th-century art, colonialism and cartography and is active on various advisory committees, such as the one focused on the restitution of looted colonial heritage, in the context of Dutch politics, and the steering group of a National Museum of Slavery.