France has 67 paintings taken from the Netherlands in the Napoleonic era, a new exhibition has revealed. At the opening of the exhibition called Loot – 10 stories, Mauritshuis director Martine Gosselink revealed that some of a selection of almost 200 paintings that once belonged to William V were confiscated and some never returned.
The exhibition represents these 67 looted works, which would belong to the Mauritshuis, with a wall full of empty gaps alongside two paintings that were successfully reclaimed: Paulus Potter’s Cows Reflected in the Water and Jan Mijtens’ The Marriage of Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg with Louise Henriette of Orange in 1646.
It also tells the stories of other looted Napoleonic, colonial and Nazi looted art, with the help of video, virtual reality and objects created in perfect detail, in three dimensions in the digital world.
Gosselink said, however, that the museum had no current plans to make a claim on the other pieces. “Do we really need them? Do we miss them from our collections? Do we have empty depots or museums? Are they so critical that we can’t tell our history without them, or so iconic or financially important? To all these questions, the answer is no.”
She pointed out that there is no history of hundreds of years of oppression or racism, or memories of horror from, for example, the Nazi era when art was also looted. The Netherlands has the highest density of museums in the world, the exhibition says, so the paintings can serve “as ambassadors of the wonderful art created in our country in the 17thcentury.”
Gosselink added: “In general, stolen things should be given back, whether that’s Nazi looted art or colonial looted art…but we, as the Mauritshuis do not ourselves have the desire to ask for the 70 works that are in France to be given back.”
Image : Looted art in the times of Napoleon. Photo: Ivo Hoekstra, Mauritshuis
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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