two years sorting and “restoring” these drawings and placing them in specially made
folders.201
Where exactly they would have then been kept is not clear. Most likely in the flat-top cabinet
in the Oval Room. Either way, they and the other prints and drawings from the museum’s
collection would not have been displayed prominently, simply because that would not have
been deemed adequate storage for this type of art. This, in turn, provides another reason why
the art collections were initially eclipsed, despite their high quality: beside the expansive
scientific instruments and glittering minerals, they would not exactly have constituted eye-
catchers. In addition to this, they were at least as fragile as the instruments, and it would have
been a burden for the manservant showing visitors around the museum to take these works of
art out of their folders and show them to visitors.
Interestingly, early during the museum’s history the idea of creating a cabinet of art in an
adjacent building was launched, yet not implemented. In June 1786 the tenants of the house
next to the Foundation House appear to have moved out, because the trustees decided not to
put it on the market again. One of the reasons for this decision was that it would have needed
a complete and costly overhaul to make it “habitable for respectable people”. But, more
importantly, the trustees also decided against renting out the house “because an, at the
moment admittedly distant, aim of the Trustees always remains to bring together in this House
a Cabinet of Paintings, or to employ this house for some other purpose for the benefit of this
Foundation”.202 In all likelihood this house was where van Mamm’s chemical laboratory was
installed four years later.
3. Changing Definitions of “Art”
The plans for a cabinet of paintings seem to have then been shelved, for they are not
mentioned again for the next decades. They actually only resurface after Wybrand Hendriks
had resigned from his post because of old age in 1819. He was succeeded by Gerrit Jan
Michaélis, another painter, who moved to Haarlem from Amsterdam.
By the time Michaélis was appointed as kastelein by the Foundation, the world of fine art had
undergone a profound transformation. This was the result of a variety of complex and
interconnected developments, the roots of which often lie in far earlier periods of history, and
the effects of which only came to the fore far later, in the second half of the 19th century. The
causes underlying these historical processes are hard to pinpoint, in fact it is often impossible
to distinguish between the causes and the effects of these developments. For the purposes of
201 Altena, Buisman, and Kops, Wybrand Hendriks 1744-1831, 13.
“voor fatzoenlijke Lieden bewoonbaar”; “alzo steeds een, schoon thans nog ver afgelegen oogmerk bij
Directeuren blijft stand houden, om in dit Huis een Cabinet van Schilderijen bijeentebrengen, o f hetzelve huis tot
eenig ander einde ten dienste deezer Fundatie te emploieeren”; “Directienotulen”, 16.06.1786, Haarlem, ATS,
vol. 5.
this study, a brief and ultimately no more than superficial sketch of the outlines of the
developments surrounding the transformation of the art world around 1800 will therefore have
to suffice.
In the most general of terms, what was happening was that “art” was increasingly equated
with “fine art” - painting in particular - and was ever more frequently pitted against
“science”. The origins of a dichotomy that came to dominate the cultural world throughout the
20th century can be perceived, with on the one hand “art” being associated with an
individual’s creative, imaginative, unpredictable, irreproducible travails, and on the other
hand “science” carrying connotations of sober, disinterested, methodologically plodding yet
highly complex and programmatic work. Lorraine Daston has studied the status of the
“imagination” in the intellectual landscape. “Between about 1780 and 1820”, she summarises,
“[p]ut in the briefest of terms, facts hardened, the imagination ran riot, and art and science
diverged in their aims and in their collective personae”.
These developments were clearly felt in the Netherlands too, and are not just an “after the
fact” assessment by historians. In 1809, for instance, Johan Meerman, who at the time carried
the title of “Director-General of the Sciences and Arts” in the Kingdom of the Netherlands
(the Emperor Napoleon’s younger brother Louis had been crowned king in 1806), made the
following appeal in a speech during which the King himself was present:
“One errs greatly, if one views the fine arts only as a luxury of a people. They are closely
connected with national prosperity, they are in particular linked with the promotion and the
splendour of the factories, and with a number of the sciences; and to pay tribute to the latter,
while despising and rejecting the former would be nothing but to want to tear two inseparable
things apart [emphasis MW], and to deprive the sciences of what in so many respects not only
may serve to their adornment, but even to their elucidation and development, and sometimes
to disfigure them to a withered and ungainly body.”
Just as interesting as the statement itself is the context within which it was made: Meerman
was speaking at the presentation of the “Royal Prize of Painting and Etching”, which was
presented at the town hall of Amsterdam, where all the contestants’ works were exhibited in a
public art show. This serves to illustrate three crucial points. Firstly, the government (the
King) was trying to impose a sense of taste on his subjects (i.e. “the public”) by stimulating
and encouraging the production of a particular kind of fine art (whatever was eligible for and
won the prize). This marks a shift away from the formative role of private patronage in the art
203 Lorraine Daston, “Fear & Loathing o f the Imagination in Science,” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005): 22_
204 “Men dwaalt ten zeersten, wanneer men de schoone kunsten alleenlijk als den luxe van een volk beschouwt.
Zij staan met den geheelen nationaalen voorspoed, zij staan inzonderheid met de bevordenng en, den‘
fabrijken, en met eene reeks van wetenschappen in het naauwste verband; en aandeeze te willen hulde doen, met
minachting en verwerping van geene, zou niet anders zijn, dan twee onaficheidebjke dingen van een te wdlen
scheuren [emphasis MW], en de wetenschappen v a n 't geen I zoo veel opzigten tot haar cieraad met aUeen
maar zelfs tot haare opheldering en ontwikkeling strekken kan, te beroven, en somwijlen haar tot een dor en
onbevallig ligchaam te misvormen.” Johan Meerman, Aanspraak van den Directeur-Generaal de
Weetenschappen en Künsten, bij de uitdeeling der koninklijke prijzen van sehr der- en graveerkunsk op he
Raadhuis te Amsterdam, den 18 van herfstmaand 1809: voorafgegaan door deszelfs rapport aan Ztjne Majest>eit
wegens de ten toon Stelling des voorigen jaars en de toewijzing der prijzen (Amsterdam, s-Gravenhage.
Gebroeders Van Cleef, 1809), 6-7.