The Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands has mounted an exhibition of largely blank walls showing where it might have hung 70 paintings seized by French forces during the Napoleonic era and never returned.
While museums around the western world take up issues of provenance, both in regard to artworks stolen by Nazi occupiers in World War II and with demands to return objects their own countries took from indigenous peoples in their colonies, this is a more unusual issue, and the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, isn’t really sure it’s calling for the return of the pictures.
Mauritshuis director Martine Gosselink, at the opening of the Loot: 10 Stories exhibition, said “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 suggested that the case for the Napoleonic loot, about a third of what was originally seized and sent to France, is different, saying that it doesn’t have a connection to either hundreds of years of colonial oppression or to the horrors of the Nazi era. Perhaps, she suggested, the paintings can serve “as ambassadors of the wonderful art created in our country in the 17th century.”
