Rutte softens Mauritshuis criticism as ‘statues to slavery’ row rumbles on

DutchNews, January 22, 2018

Prime minister Mark Rutte has tempered his criticism of the Mauritshuis’s decision to remove a statue of its founder from the foyer after the museum’s director said there were no plans to write him out of its history. 

Rutte weighed in on the row on Friday after it emerged that a plaster copy of an original bust had been taken away in September. In his weekly radio interview the prime minister warned against ‘iconoclasm’, adding: ‘We should be careful not to impose the perspective of today’s society on history from a long time ago.’ 

‘If you take away the statue of your founder, you need to change the name,’ said Rutte. 

Over the weekend museum director Emilie Gordenker said the statue had been removed because it was unnecessary. An original bust of Johan Maurits van Nassau, a 17th-century governor of the Netherlands’ Brazilian colonies who built the Mauritshuis using the fortune he made from the sugar cane trade, remains on display and several portraits of the museum’s founder hang on its walls. 

‘Modern eyes’ 

Rutte acknowledged in a tweet on Sunday that his choice of the Mauritshuis to illustrate his point was misjudged. ‘My argument was and is that we shouldn’t judge history from long ago through modern eyes,’ he said.

Mijn argument was en is de verder weg liggende geschiedenis niet te beoordelen met de bril van nu, maar begrijp in Buitenhof van mijn buurvrouw dat mijn voorbeeld van het Mauritshuis niet goed gekozen was. Ik kom graag snel weer langs.

— Mark Rutte (@MinPres) January 21, 2018