The 30th of June and the 1st of July 2025, we will gather at the Trippenhuis for a symposium marking the culmination of four years of research by The Female Impact project. This landmark event will showcase new research results, featuring presentations by our project members and distinguished guest speakers. Alongside engaging discussions, we will offer exclusive tours of the historic Trippenhuis, providing a unique backdrop to our findings. All are welcome!
Register here now (deadline 1 May 2025). Download the full program, including abstracts, here.
The Female Impact
Building on the groundbreaking work of the late 1990s and the steady progress in cataloguing the output of women artists, the study of women and gender in 17th-century Dutch art is now flourishing. Women are no longer overlooked; they are now a vital part of conference programs, surveys of Dutch and Flemish art, and museum displays of the Dutch Republic’s artistic heritage. Significant strides have been made in understanding the roles women played in art and how these roles evolved throughout their lifetimes. The study of women and gender is now central to the discourse on Dutch art, broadening and enriching our understanding of art production and consumption in this period. Consequently, our view of the art production and consumption of the time, as well as its academic study have become more inclusive, nuanced, and vibrant. Women were, and always have been, everywhere. This raises the question: where to from here?
This symposium aims to collectively assess the current state of scholarship, comparing research findings across cultures, countries, and disciplines. We seek to deepen our understanding of the implications of recent research and chart new avenues for further study.
The symposium coincides with the culmination of The Female Impact research project, led by Judith Noorman, which will conclude in the summer of 2025. This project contributes to the growing body of scholarship by demonstrating that women influenced all facets and stages of art production and consumption in the Northern Netherlands. Beyond creating art, women managed sales within client networks, oversaw workshop productivity, and handled financial and legal matters. Women also traded in art, sold artists’ materials, and contributed to the family economy in myriad ways they found both profitable and fulfilling. On the buyer’s side, both newly discovered and previously known documents prove that women, aristocratic and non-aristocratic alike, selected art and artists, judged commissioned works, negotiated prices, had paintings repaired, and bequeathed them to future generations. Women also oversaw building projects, demonstrating their influence beyond art collection alone. Together, our research reexamines the household as a site of agency, power, and self-actualization—both in the art market and beyond. By looking at these overlooked dynamics, we have uncovered insights that apply equally to men’s roles in art production and consumption in the Dutch Republic.
Our venue, The Trippenhuis Building, offers a fitting backdrop for these discussions. Famously built for Louis and Hendrick Trip, brothers who amassed their fortune through arms dealing, artillery, and other military supplies, the Trippenhuis is a monumental testament to traditional male power. As such, this house, and its interior, poses a challenge to the long-held belief that the domestic realm was exclusively a woman’s domain. Does the building and its decoration complicate research based on that assumption, or did the women of the Trippenhuis leave their own indelible marks—and if so, how? Participants will have exclusive access to the building, which is typically closed to the public, to explore these questions firsthand.
Papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication in an edited volume organized by The Female Impact.
Program
Monday June 30
Judith Noorman, Welcome and opening lecture
Session 1: The Invisibility Myth of Women in the Archives
Piet Bakker, Bejaarde Dochters (Elderly Daughters) in Haarlem and Leiden and Their Interest in Painting; 1600-1699
John Loughman, The Reluctant Patron: Adriana van Beveren and Aelbert Cuyp
Saskia Beranek, Navigating the Waters of Home and State: Wives, Widows and Art Collecting in the Seventeenth Century
Session 2: House(holds) as Space or Place
Amy Orrock, Elizabeth Murray, Peter Lely and Self-Fashioning at Ham House
Lucy Chiswell, Antwerp, Alkmaar, Amersfoort and Amsterdam: The Domestic Realm of Alethea Talbot Howard, Countess of Arundel, as Exile in the Low Countries
Marianne Eekhout, Family First. Preserving Family Heritage in the Late Seventeenth Century
Miara Fraikin, The Gendered Dimension of the Alcove Bedchamber: From European Aristocracy to the Dutch Elite
Guided tours
PechaKucha presentations by Maaike Abma, Romy Kerkhof, and Femke Valkhoff
Tuesday July 1
Session 3: Patron’s Choices
Joris Oddens & Anne-Linde Ruiter, Clean Sheets. A Fresh Perspective on Dutch Regentessenstukken
Margriet van Eikema Hommes, Ferdinand Bol’s Painted Chamber for Jacoba Lampsins: New Evidence on Iconography, Date, and the Patron’s Intentions
Sander Karst, Luxury, Gender, and Display: Pieter Gerritsz van Roestraeten’s Still Lifes as Mirrors of Female Consumption in Late Seventeenth-Century London
Session 4: Female Expertise
Erin Griffey, Power in Their Own Hands: Early Modern Women and the Art of Beauty
Christine Quach, Virtuous Time: Women and Their Sewing Boxes as Extensions of Legacy
Hannah Prescott, Knowing Through Touch: Women and the Dutch Linen Trade in the Long Seventeenth Century
Session 5: Work Dynamics
Marleen Puyenbroek, Women in the Art Trade: The Merchant’s Journey of Catharina van den Dorpe
Irene Jacobs, Maritime Women and the Art Market
Elizabeth Beattie, Geertruydt Roghman’s ‘Vrouwtjes’: Art, Agency, and Domestic Economy in the Dutch Republic
Session 6: Fame & Agency
Frima Fox Hofrichter, A Case Study of the “Afterlife” of a Rediscovered Artist: Judith Leyster
Stephanie Dickey, Female Agency in the Art of Rembrandt and his Circle
Anna Lawrence, Befriending Fortuna, Fashioning Fame
More information
Visit The Female Impact-website here.