As of Saturday 20 December, the Kunsthal Rotterdam presents the historical exhibition ‘Two Hundred Years of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Atlas Van Stolk’. Hundreds of prints, drawings, photographs, cartoons and posters from the Atlas Van Stolk – atlas is an Old Dutch term meaning collection -illustrate the lives of the Dutch people during two centuries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and show how they have viewed themselves over the years. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey into their lives during this period and compares this with today’s social environment. The exhibition is part of the celebrations taking place to mark two hundred years of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The Atlas Van Stolk
The founder of the Atlas Van Stolk was the Rotterdam-borntimber merchant Abraham van Stolk. In 1835, driven by a passion for the history of his fatherland, he began collecting pictures that would provide a broad perspective on society as it was in his day. The collection, which was further expanded by several generations of the Van Stolk family, now contains over a quarter of a million pictures and is still growing. The Atlas is one of the largest image collections in the Netherlands to date.
image credit: Sebastian Krüger
