AFMh News June 2018

New AFMh Board Members

The American Friends of the Mauritshuis is pleased to announce the election of three new Board members. The new Board members—with their varied backgrounds—further extend the AFMh’s Board expertise across a range of disciplines including curating, collecting, arts management, non-profit and museum leadership, philanthropy, Dutch-American relations, business, finance and more. We are delighted to welcome the following new members:

Stein Berre, Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

To view Stein Berre’s profile, click here.

AMFh Board Member Stein Berre

Freddy Boom, Head North America for Industrials, Services & Transportation, Global Banking at Standard Chartered Bank, based in New York

To view Freddy Boom’s profile, click here.

AFMh Board Member Freddy Boom

Adam Eaker, Assistant Curator of European Paintings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

To view Adam Eaker’s profile, click here.

AFMh Board Member Adam Eaker

The AFMh thanks its Board members stepping down at the end of 2017:

Otto Naumann
Peter Sutton

Fay Hartog Levin Receives Royal Decoration

Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Henne Schuwer with former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Fay Hartog-Levin

The Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Henne Schuwer presented AFMh Board member and former US Ambassador Fay Hartog-Levin a royal decoration and inducted her as an officer into the Order of Orange Nassau for her longstanding commitment to strengthening the bilateral relationship between the Netherlands and the United States.

To read more, click here.

2018/19 AFMh-Fulbright Fellow

The AFMh is pleased to announce its new Fulbright Fellow, Kathryn Harada.

Kathryn (Kat) Harada is thrilled to be the 2018-2019 American Friends of the Mauritshuis/Fulbright Fellow in Paintings Conservation at the Mauritshuis. Kat graduated from Smith College in 2008 with a BA in Art History and Italian, and earned an M.A. and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Art Conservation from SUNY Buffalo State College in 2017. She worked as a pre-program conservation intern at Shangri La, Doris Duke’s former residence in Honolulu before attending Buffalo. During her graduate training, she focused on the research and treatment of Old Master to 19th century painting and held internships at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Gallery of Art. Kat will be moving to Den Haag from Los Angeles, where she is currently completing a post graduate internship year at the J. Paul Getty Museum. There, she is working on two Italian panel paintings, a 14th century Taddeo Gaddi and a 17th century Giulio Cesare Procaccini. Additionally, she is studying a painting on cardboard by 19th century French artist, Henri de Toulous-Lautrec. Kat loves to work on challenging treatments, and is especially interested in artists’ materials, and the ethics and impact of historic restoration practice on Old Master paintings. Kat is very excited to work with and learn from the exceptional paintings conservators at the Mauritshuis and to collaborate with students and researchers at the University of Amsterdam during her Fellowship year in the Netherlands, and is very grateful to the American Friends of the Mauritshuis for their generous support of this opportunity.

For more information about the Fulbright-American Friends of the Mauritshuis award, please click here.

Kathryn Harada

Jan Steen’s Histories

In the recently closed exhibition, Jan Steen’s Histories, at the Mauritshuis presented a selection of Jan Steen’s finest history paintings. This seventeenth-century Dutch artist is best known as a painter of chaotic and disorderly scenes of everyday life, which gave rise to the popular Dutch proverb ‘a Jan Steen household’. But he also painted very different subjects: stories from the Bible, classical mythology and antiquity. On view at the Mauritshuis from 15 February until 13 May 2018, this stellar exhibition was supported by the American Friends of the Mauritshuis. AFMh Board member Dr. Mariët Westermann contributed to the catalogue.

Jan Steen, Moses and Pharaoh’s Crown, c. 1670, Mauritshuis, The Hague

To view the posting in the Apollo Magazine, click here.

For more information on the exhibition at the Mauritshuis, click here.

AFMh Launches New Website

The American Friends of the Mauritshuis are pleased to announce the launch of the new website, afmauritshuis.org. The website offers a cleaner, more contemporary look, as well as greater reliability. By enabling AFMh to directly update content of the site, and by including an event registration module the cost of operating the website will be reduced.

The new site accommodates on-line member donations at prescribed levels and online payments of any amount. The website was built by Jos and Martin Scheffelaar of Scheffelaar Consulting LLC of Boston, in coordination with the marketing department of the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands.