RKD STUDIES

(in alphabetical order)

Michiel Franken
Michiel Franken studied art history at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Between 1989 and 1999 he was scientific staff member in the Rembrandt Research Project. He has worked for the RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague since 1999, starting as project manager of the Rembrandt Research Project archives and since 2008 as curator of technical documentation & Rembrandt and the Rembrandt school. He is also senior editor of The Rembrandt Database.

C. Richard Johnson, Jr.
C. Richard Johnson, Jr. received the first PhD minor in Art History granted by Stanford University along with a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1977.
Forty years later, he is the Jacobs Fellow in Computational Arts and Humanities at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech (New York, NY) and the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).
He is also currently a Visiting Research Scholar in the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, a Scientific Researcher of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Computational Art History Advisor to the RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague. In the past decade Professor Johnson has founded four multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, pioneering projects in the new field of computational art history. Their aim is the development of computer-based procedures assisting in the matching of manufactured patterns in art supports: canvas thread count automation (in 2007), historic photographic paper classification (in 2010), laid paper chain line pattern marking and matching (in 2012), and watermark identification in Rembrandt's etchings (in 2015).
Professor Johnson has co-authored papers arising from these projects in The Burlington Magazine, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Studies in Conservation, Art Matters, the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
Weave match hunting among early Chinese silk paintings and assisting in the identification of watermarks in the prints and drawings of Rembrandt and his pupils are Professor Johnson's future principal interests.

Petria Noble
Petria Noble is Head of Paintings Conservation at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Between 1996 and 2014 she worked as a paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. She carried out her graduate studies in art history and conservation at New York University and trained at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As an expert in the material aspects and conservation of 17th-century Dutch paintings she has lectured and published widely (more than 50 peer reviewed papers predominantly in conservation and technical art history journals). Her research interests center on technical investigations of Old Master paintings as a key to understanding artists’ painting techniques and changes in appearance. As part of the interdisciplinary Science4Arts ReVisualizing Rembrandt project (2012-2018), co-funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the American National Science Foundation (NSF), she is currently researching the application of non-destructive imaging techniques for the study of late Rembrandt paintings. She is also a member of the editorial board of Art Matters: International Journal for Technical Art History.

William A. Sethares
William A. Sethares received the B.A. degree in mathematics from Brandeis University and the M.S. and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University. He is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and a Research Scientist in the Conservation department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Sethares is the author of the books Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (2004) and Rhythm and Transforms (2007), and his current work on image processing is focused on applications in art history and conservation.

Chris Stolwijk
Chris Stolwijk studied political sciences and art history at the Free University (Amsterdam) and Utrecht University. He gained his PhD in 1997 for a research into the position of art and artists in the Netherlands around 1850-1900. Currently, he is General Director of the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague and Professor of Dutch art history in an international context, 1800-1940, at Utrecht University.
Stolwijk led various large-scale research projects and (co-)curated a number of international exhibitions, including Vincent’s Choice (2003), Van Gogh and the Colours of the Night (2008-2009) and Van Gogh & Nature (2015). The focus of his input lies in West-European painting from the period around 1800-1920. This interest is manifested in numerous publications and other contributions.

Ige Verslype
Ige Verslype studied Art History at Utrecht University and was trained as a paintings conservator at the Limburg Conservation Institute (SRAL) in Maastricht.
She has been working as a paintings conservator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam since 2004.
In 2013 she joined the interdisciplinary research project From Isolation to Coherence: an Integrated Technical, Visual and Historical Study of 17th and 18th Century Dutch Painting Ensembles.
She is conducting her PhD research on the technical development of painted wall hangings in the context of this project.

Sytske Weidema
Sytske Weidema studied art history at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, and specialized in workshop studios of early Netherlandish painters and in technical art history.
She worked as an intern at the Groeningemuseum (Bruges), was a fellow at the European Paintings Department in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and worked as research assistant at the Cantor Art Center (Stanford University, CA). In 2012, together with Anna Koopstra, she published the book Jan Gossart: the documentary evidence, in the frame of the Jan Gossart exhibition at the Metropolitan and National Gallery in London. After working as a teacher and guide in several museums, she became project associate for the technical research database and project manager of The Rembrandt Database (www.rembrandtdatabase.org) at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague.

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. is curator of northern baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art and Professor of art history at the University of Maryland.
Wheelock has lectured widely on Dutch and Flemish art and has written numerous articles, books and catalogues, including Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists around 1650 (1977); Vermeer and the Art of Painting (1995) and the systematic catalogues Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (1995) and Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (2005). In 2014, Wheelock revised and expanded his catalogue of the National Gallery’s vastly expanded Dutch collection as an online edition.
Wheelock has also organized numerous major exhibitions, including Gods, Saints & Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt (1980); Anthony van Dyck (1990); Johannes Vermeer (1995); Gerrit Dou, 1613-1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt (2000); Gerard ter Borch (2004); Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age (2009); and Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry (2017).