THE HAGUE.- This spring, the Mauritshuis is offering visitors a fresh way to experience some of the most celebrated paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Beginning April 23, the museum opens Pentimenti – Stephan Vanfleteren among the Masters, a new exhibition that places contemporary photography in direct conversation with 17th-century masterpieces.
At the center of the project is acclaimed Belgian photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, known internationally for his powerful black-and-white portraits and emotionally charged visual storytelling. Rather than simply responding to history, Vanfleteren was invited to engage deeply with the Mauritshuis collection and reinterpret its themes for a modern audience.
The result is a series of sixteen photographs, fifteen of them newly created, installed throughout the museum among works that have shaped European art history for centuries. Instead of presenting the photographs in a separate gallery, the Mauritshuis has chosen to weave them into its permanent collection, allowing visitors to move between old and new, painting and photography, past and present.
The idea for the exhibition came from Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis, who invited Vanfleteren to explore what these paintings still have to say today. Together, they walked through the museum’s sixteen rooms, considering the hidden meanings, moral lessons, and human emotions embedded in works created four hundred years ago.
Those questions became the foundation of the exhibition: What were artists trying to communicate in their own time? Which of those ideas still resonate now? And how can contemporary art reopen that conversation?
For each gallery, Vanfleteren created a photograph inspired by a particular artwork or theme. His images do not imitate the paintings around them. Instead, they challenge, echo, or expand them through symbolism, reflection, contrast, and atmosphere. Visitors are encouraged to see familiar masterpieces through a new lens.
The exhibition title refers to the Italian word pentimenti, a term used in painting to describe changes or corrections artists made while working. Traces of earlier decisions sometimes remain visible beneath the final surface. Vanfleteren extends that idea beyond art itself, asking what human mistakes—personal, political, historical—remain visible in the world today.
That broader meaning gives the show unusual emotional depth. These are not simply visual tributes to old masters. They are meditations on memory, vulnerability, beauty, and the unfinished nature of human progress.
Vanfleteren previously worked with the Mauritshuis during the museum’s 2022 anniversary exhibition FLASH | BACK, where he created a memorable image inspired by The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn. That photograph returns in the new exhibition, linking the earlier collaboration to this more ambitious project.
Alongside the exhibition, the museum is publishing a companion book titled Pentimenti: Letters on Pigment, Light and Consolation, featuring correspondence between Vanfleteren and Gosselink during the creative process. Their letters explore not only the Mauritshuis collection, but also art, identity, and the modern world.
Known for capturing both strength and fragility in his subjects, Vanfleteren brings a deeply personal perspective to the museum’s historic rooms. His work asks viewers not only to admire old masterpieces, but to reconsider what they mean now.
Pentimenti – Stephan Vanfleteren among the Masters runs from April 23 through August 23, 2026, at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
