The museum says the decision wasn’t an attempt to review the past, but it was taken because the museum replaced a plastic copy with an original statue of Maurits and put it in another gallery.
Source: Rainer Ebert/Flickr
The Mauritshuis in The Hague removed a plaster statue of the museum founder, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, who built the Mauritshuis in 1641 using the fortune he earned from enslaving Ghanians and making them work on sugarcane plantations.
Some Dutch conservative politicians defended the bust. For example, prime minister Mark Rutte called the move “crazy” and warned against “judging the distant past through today’s eyes”, according to artforum.com. Dienke Hondius, a historian at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, also says that public monuments should be “left standing and put in context”, citing a campaign in Barcelona to remove the statue of Christopher Columbus. Politician Antoinette Laan commented on the incident: “We are importing the American tendency to oversensitivity.”
Despite criticism from certain politicians, the Netherlands tries to reckon with its past. In Amsterdam, a school named after Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a former Dutch East Indies governor known as the “Butcher of Banda”, is going to be renamed. Coen earned his nickname for a massacre on the island of Banda in 1821 that killed 14,000 natives.
The museum denies any allegations of trying to rub out the name of its founder, but politicians draw parallels between the Netherlands and the US in their efforts to reckon with the past, according to the Guardian.
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