RKD on PAN Podium
From November 24 to December 1, 2024, the 37th edition of the art, design and antiques fair PAN Amsterdam will take place in the RAI Amsterdam. The RKD will take part in the PAN Podium program on Sunday 24 November.
PAN Podium
During PAN Amsterdam, 125 art dealers, antique dealers and gallery owners are showing their best pieces in the fields of art, antiques and design. PAN Podium offers visitors to PAN Amsterdam a varied program full of inspiring talks and interactive presentations. This year the programming each day will focus on a different theme.
Collectors, art dealers and widows
On Sunday, November 24, PAN Podium is devoted to Herstory. Femke Valkhoff, curator at the RKD, has been asked to give a lecture on the research she did on women in the Dutch art market between 1860 and 1930. Everyone has heard of women collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim, Isabella Steward Gardner and Helene Kröller-Müller. They established their own museums for the collections they gathered. But there were more women who collected. They usually did so on a smaller scale than Kröller-Müller, and their collections were more often dispersed after their deaths than ending up in museums.
In addition to being collectors, women were also active in the art market as sellers. Widows of artists sold off the remaining paintings from their husbands' studios. A few traded in art and set up their own business. Femke Valkhoff's talk, which shares results from new research, focuses on them. Who were these women? Why wasn't attention paid to them before? Can they serve as inspiration for current collectors and dealers? The talk Collectors, art dealers and widows: Women in the Dutch art market between 1860 and 1930 begins at 13:00.
Femke Valkhoff
Femke Valkhoff worked from February to August 2024 as a junior researcher at the RKD on the project Women collectors in art 1780-1980. There, she conducted mainly quantitative research on female buyers and sellers of art and applied art in the sales books of art dealers Van Wisselingh and Goupil. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University within the project How do Cities Make Women? Empowerment, Self-Development, and Learned Identities in the Early Modern Dutch City.