Katinka Lampe - Children's Portraits

For almost four centuries, the Van Loon family has had portraits made of their children by renowned artists like Dirck Santvoort, Nicolaes Maes and Thérèse Schwarze. This led to an extra-ordinary collection of very diverse portraits of children, from monumental to miniature. For the first time all of the Van Loon children’s portraits will be on display. A large part of the portraits comes from the Van Loon family’s private collection. 

The immediate cause for this exhibition are the portraits made by artist Katinka Lampe of the youngest generation. Lampe’s work is in high demand around the world. This year she has made contemporary portraits of the children of Philippa Colomb de Daunant - van Loon: Gisèle (2002), Felix (2003) and Casimir (2007). They are portraits of high precision and beauty, though they are not exact representations. 

While visiting the Museum Van Loon, Katinka Lampe was struck by the resemblance between her own work and the historical portraits in the collection. She has made new and has selected old works that underline these, mainly formal, similarities. 

Lampe’s style of painting is controlled and smooth. Her sensitive, though unsentimental method renders the works with a high level of abstraction. The combination of historical portraits and the contemporary works by Lampe invites the spectator to look in a different way. The formal and abstract aspects of the portraits take over from the emphasis on realistic representation of the individual. This also creates more space for personal associations evoked by the portraits. There will be more than 40 works by Katinka Lampe on view.