‘As a Token of Appreciation for her Dauntless Struggle…’

The Many Portraits of Aletta Jacobs by Isaac Israels

Abstract

In this article, Mineke Bosch links art historical objects and interpretations to historical documents associated with the women’s movement in the Netherlands. Her focus is on a portrait of the prominent feminist Aletta Jacobs by the impressionist painter Isaac Israels. After the suffrage bill passed in 1919, the portrait was commissioned by the Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht to honour its president, with the implicit objective that the portrait be accepted into the collection of a national museum, i.e. the Rijksmuseum. Israels made five substantial portraits and two sketches of Jacobs, before finalizing one formal portrait. On the instigation of the minister of Art and Sciences, however, the Rijksmuseum turned down the offer, probably for political reasons. Open questions that remain are: why was Israels chosen to paint the portrait of Aletta Jacobs? Why did he produce such a large number of portraits and why in so many different poses? And why was this not noticed until only very recently? A key concept in answering these questions is gender: how notions about women and men have influenced the way in which portraits of women and men were painted, the dissimilarity in how their portraits have been used, and also whether, and if so, in what way(s), a woman like Aletta Jacobs has been integrated into the Dutch collective memory.