This is an etching from 1656 by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). We can see Rembrandt’s personal friend, Abraham Francen, staring at, perhaps, another etching, mirroring the gestures and concentrated look of the contemporary art viewer. Francen was a pharmacist in 17th-century Amsterdam, who saw Rembrandt’s fame rise from nearby. Though he was not affluent, Abraham was a keen collector of paintings, prints and curiosities. I used this print as a starting point for the community workshops I held at the UCL Art Museum throughout 2012, because ‘collecting’ was a core theme in my narratives about Dutch colonial history, global encounters and 17th-century art.

My name is Stefanie van Gemert; I am a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the UCL Dutch Department, and this summer I worked on an HLF-funded community project called Treasures from the East. This project takes place at the Wallace Collection, not so far from UCL, and involves a year-long engagement with London community groups. The groups – mainly women with a migrant background – visit the Wallace Collection’s Dutch art on a regular basis and use Dutch 17th-century paintings as inspiration for creative art works that will be exhibited from November 2012 onwards. The project focuses on the Dutch East India Company as a major force behind the arts boom during the Netherlands’ golden age.

When I heard about this project, I was immediately enthused and wanted to contribute as a young researcher and teacher in Dutch history and culture, and postcolonial theory. Together with the Collection’s Audience Development Officer, Sophie Martin, I took on the challenge of developing a programme of four day-long workshops at UCL Art Museum and the Wallace Collection. To this end I researched objects from UCL Art Museum and UCL Special Collections; raised funds, and prepared and coordinated the workshops at UCL. It was great to work with the participants, in an informal setting, without the pressure of exams: just for the sake of having engaging learning sessions around wonderful objects.

The Art Museum was an apt place to invite and welcome the community groups to. Through their previous visits to the Wallace Collection, they were familiar with a large national gallery. They had seen many Dutch oil paintings, in a beautiful – though at times imposing – family collection. It is hard to think of a more different setting than the UCL Art Museum: an intimate working museum space on a university campus, developed with research and teaching in mind. The prints from the Art Museum and books from UCL Special collections offered a different perspective on ‘art objects’, and what one may consider ‘Treasures from the East’.

What a surprise as well to find Dutch links in the Art Museum’s collections! There is the Grote Collection: donated by George Grote (1794-1871) to UCL in 1872. Like Abraham Francen, Grote’s Dutch grandfather Andreas Grote (1710-188) collected prints and drawings, and his grandson bequeathed his albums to the university. There were also many Rembrandt etchings in the UCL Art collections (like the Abraham Francen-print from the museum’s Vaughan Collection).
If you would like to learn more about the workshop programme, please read my Wallace Collection’s project blog entries.

I truly enjoyed working with this group of creative and inspiring women, challenging narratives of colonial history by focusing on global encounters, discussing and holding a wide range of objects  in the Art Museum of a global university.

The partnership programme ‘Treasures from the East at UCL’ was made possible with the help of the UCL Step Out fund.

This entry originally appeared on the UCL Museums blog (minor edits).

There we met the women from West Ealing Deaf Minorities Group who showed us their pink treasure bags and discussed their freshly-printed family treasure trails over tea. The two colourful treasure trails will soon be available at the Wallace Collection, where they will help families to understand the Collection’s Dutch paintings better through play. I had a preview of both trails in the East Galleries and they were great fun – I can definitely recommend them!

During the workshop, I spoke with the group about treasures, travels and the history of the Dutch East India Company. The books from the seventeenth and eighteenth century helped us to get a sense of how the world started to become smaller in the seventeenth century, through trading and travelling. At the same time, they were beautiful historical objects made out of precious material, such as Moroccan leather, silks (probably from China or India) and gold. It was a unique experience to be able to touch these books, and see them in close-up: they were pieces of history, and brought the story about the Dutch East India Company to life.

Whilst Rembrandt and his clients lived in Amsterdam and indulged in collecting expensive ‘treasures from the East’, other – often poor – Dutchmen spent months working on ships to meet and trade with other people. During the workshop we learnt that besides exchanging goods, they were also exchanging knowledge and tastes: travellers studied other languages; Europeans learnt about Indian medicine through a Portuguese doctor in Goa; spices made Western dishes far tastier; Japanese robes became a ‘scientific’ fashion.

After the workshop we met in the East Galleries to try out the new trails developed by the group. Many thanks, West Ealing group, for your stories and other input during the workshop! I hope you enjoyed your visit and you feel inspired by the books when working on your art work for the Treasures from the East exhibition.

My name is Stefanie van Gemert. I am a researcher at the UCL Dutch Department, where I also teach Dutch culture and history to students from University College London. Knowing of the hidden treasures at the UCL Art Museum and UCL Special Collections. I thought it would be fun to invite the Treasures from the East participants to UCL. I thought these visits may inspire participants when creating art works for their final exhibition at the Wallace Collection.

On 17 May, Sophie and I welcomed Aaina Women’s Group and some of the Community Ambassadors to the UCL Art Museum for a workshop on the history of the Dutch East India Company and the seventeenth-century Netherlands. We had a close-up look at a range of etchings from the UCL Art Museum – displayed for the day by curator Andrea Fredericksen. These etchings were a starting point for discussion and reflection. Questions that came up were (for example): why would someone sign up to leave on a Dutch East India Company ship? And: who would come along and would return on the ships? Besides that, we got to know some very curious animals!

UCL Special Collections is part of the UCL Library, and deals with rare books and old manuscripts. Tabitha Tuckett and Gill Furlong from Special Collections were at the workshop to help out when the participants were handling the fragile books they had brought along. We saw an official letter from 1674 with old hand writing and the seal of the Dutch Stadholder William III (who later became King of England). There was also a beautiful book in Hebrew: a Humash, the first five books of the Jewish Torah. This book showed the diversity of Amsterdam at the time, which was a real migrants’ town in the seventeenth century. Additionally, we looked at an exciting and beautiful multilingual map depicting Asia, from a rare book by Gotfried Hensel from 1741, showing the diversity of languages across this vast continent.

In the afternoon we had lunch at the Wallace Collection and discussed the objects further over tea and sandwiches. The Aaina Women and the Ambassadors then linked the UCL objects from the morning session to the Dutch paintings in the East Galleries. We recognised objects from Rembrandt’s curiosity cabinet and wondered where the pigments in the colourful dresses of Ter Borgh came from.

Thank you for your input and thoughts during this fun workshop!