RKD STUDIES

For many years, Ellinoor Bergvelt (formerly University of Amsterdam), has been connected to the RKD as an associate researcher. After the release of her extensive collection catalogue of the Dulwich Picture Gallery on the RKD Studies platform in 2021, she embarked on a new project: annotating and translating Théophile Thoré-Bürger’s Musées de la Hollande. This important publication, dating from 1858-1860, heralded a new era in the historiography of seventeenth-century Dutch art. For a long time, it determined how Dutch art was viewed, appreciated, and emulated. The RKD holds a unique copy of the first volume, containing handwritten annotations by the author himself, probably made in preparation for a second edition, which, however, was never realized.

This RKD Study is limited to an annotated translation of the first chapter of Musées de la Hollande about the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, by Thoré-Bürger simply called ‘the Museum of Amsterdam’. Relying on her extensive knowledge of the history of institutional collecting in the Netherlands, Bergvelt has identified all artworks mentioned in this first chapter. She matched these with the entries in some of the older collection catalogues of the Rijksmuseum and, together with volunteers Ineke Goudswaard and Paul van Kooij, entered them into the RKD Images database. Additionally, she translated Thoré-Bürger’s text into English and further contextualized it by including numerous annotations. Thoré-Bürger-specialist Frances Suzman Jowell took on the transcription and translation of the author’s handwritten notes, which in turn were annotated further by Bergvelt.

Publishing translations and annotated editions of significant art historical publications and sources has traditionally been one of the core activities of the RKD.¹ At the same time, the institute aims to keep up with digital developments and to explore innovative technologies that can assist with, for instance, automated translation and connecting various sources of information.

Whilst Bergvelt was preparing the annotated translation Musées de la Hollande, digital capabilities advanced at a rapid pace. This made the editorial board of RKD Studies question to what extent the labor-intensive process of manually translating and annotating was still necessary to make Thoré-Bürger’s publication more widely accessible to researchers. In this light, the project also prompted a more general discussion about the relevance of and the need for such publications in a world that is becoming more and more digital. With an array of AI-tools rapidly being developed, we might be able to much more efficiently create a translation, to have the computer assist us in matching an artwork to a description, or even to connect various online sources of information to the RKD databases. Thus, strengthened by the RKD’s new strategy, which fully embraces digital possibilities and developments, the editorial board decided to produce only the first chapter—on the Rijksmuseum collection—in the current manually annotated and translated format, while offering the complete first volume, including Thoré-Bürger annotations, as a downloadable pdf-file here. Both volumes can also be found in a variety of digital formats via the Internet Archive.

This being said, it is tremendously inspiring to see how this eminent nineteenth-century publication on collecting Dutch art in the Netherlands now serves as a vehicle to explore the possibilities of the latest tools and applications for making historical sources digitally available to an audience worldwide. We express our explicit gratitude to The Friends of the RKD foundation for generously supporting particularly this aspect of the project.

Sabine Craft-Giepmans
Head of Research & Development, RKD