While in britain there is still serious concern about the Witt and Conway Libraries at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London,  which remain on life-support machines, attended to by nurses but with the doctors not quite knowing – or at least keeping family and friends in the dark – about the patients’ chances for survival, it should not be forgotten that they have a relative who is in rather more robust health: the Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksinstituut voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie; RKD) in The Hague. It is not only in excellent shape, it has also recently moved to completely refurbished premises, opened by the Queen of the Netherlands in 2007. There can be no doubt that its survival intact is of paramount importance to the inter­national art-historical community. But current proposals by the Dutch government for this state-sponsored institution mean that it too is in danger of being forced into a hospital bed.

The RKD is the world’s largest repository of documentary and archival material related to Western art from the late Middle Ages to the present day, covering painting, drawing and sculpture as well as monumental art, media art and design. It has an equally comprehensive specialist library. Although the documentation of Dutch and Flemish art forms the nucleus of the collections, its non-Netherlandish collections are outstanding and can rival, if not surpass, those found in comparable institutions around the world. There is no doubt that among its extended family, the RKD is outstanding as its most highly developed member: to name only the most important, the Deutsches Dokumentations­zentrum für Kunstgeschichte (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg; administered by the Philipps-Universität, Marburg), the Frick Art Reference Library (at the Frick Collection, New York), the photographic archives of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Witt and Conway Libraries, London, cannot claim to operate on a sim­ilarly sophisticated level. This is not only because of the RKD’s superlative collections, but also because those collections are exceptionally well looked after by an expert staff, while it is the only institution of its kind to have taken significant steps to meet the digital demands of the present age. The collections can be consulted not only in the RKD’s state-of-the-art study areas, but are increasingly made available online – not simply by scanning this material but by using databases whose intellectual framework is rigorously maintained by highly qualified specialists. This is an ongoing project, as the RKD has wisely opted for quality rather than quantity, the latter being an initially attractive but ultimately frustrating aspect of the online presence of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. All this means that there is hardly any art-historical research, especially regarding art in the Netherlands but also elsewhere, that is not carried out using the RKD’s outstanding resources and facilities.

It thus came as a shock to learn that the Dutch Secretary of Education, Culture and Science announced on 10th June in his paper outlining the proposed nationwide cuts in the arts that the RKD should no longer stand on its own but merge with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to form a single ‘top institute’.1 Although the word ‘merge’ is studiously avoided in the Secretary’s paper, there can be little doubt that this at least originally was, and probably still is, the intended course of action. The Dutch word ‘topinstituut’ is as meaningless as the English phrase ‘centre of excellence’ and thus has an irresistible ring to it in political jargon, but it cannot hide the fact that the proposal is not born from a careful analysis of the facts but is simply the result of a raw cost-cutting exercise. The Dutch government has announced that it will cut funding for scholarly research for a whole range of smaller museums, identifying at the same time a number of ‘top institutes’ that will carry out this research instead. It identifies the Rijksmuseum as one such place, and thus will not cut its research budget. It also identifies the RKD as such but, curiously, its excellence is rewarded by having its funding reduced and being forced to amalgamate with the Rijksmuseum.

Leaving aside the fact that stripping smaller Dutch museums of their individual scholarly activities means that they will become moribund, one wonders how a Rijksmus­eum/RKD ‘top institute’ could possibly work in practice? They are incompatible organisations with completely different remits. It is surely entirely unrealistic to move the RKD’s many shelf miles of documentation to the Rijksmuseum, especially when its troubled renovation has still not been concluded, not to mention the fact that this renovation will, counter-intuitively, in fact reduce the amount of available space in that Museum. And although the phrase ‘waste of resources’ may be overused in economic analyses, one would be pressed to find a better one to describe the loss of the refurbished premises and state-of-the-art facilities that have served the RKD so well in its recent reincarnation in The Hague. Such practical matters aside, there should also be serious doubts about the long-term consequences. The Bruegelian image of the big fish eating the little fish readily springs to mind, and there is no reason to assume that the big fish will not simply swallow and be done with it. One must seriously question whether such a far-reaching convergence can guarantee that the RKD will retain the necessary means to keep it in good physical health and the intellectual support to keep it in good mental health. Moreover, one of the undisputed strengths of the RKD is that it is fiercely independent, precisely because it is not a museum. It is for that reason – to name but one example – that its director, Rudi Ekkart, has been able over the last decade and a half to produce the necessary research to advise the Dutch government on the restitution of works of art, including the Goudstikker collection, whose return to its heirs left a good number of empty spaces on the walls of Dutch museums. This independence would obviously fall by the wayside.

We can only touch in the space available upon the many other problems caused by these proposals. One of these, for example, is that there are far-reaching consequences for the detailed agreements about acquisition policies between the RKD and the Dutch Royal Library, which is housed in the same complex in The Hague, and the Mauritshuis has understandably always limited its own library to the most essential volumes because it can make use of the RKD’s facilities – obvious problems that are perhaps unsurprisingly beyond the wit of policy makers. Suffice it to say that it is abundantly clear that these proposals will have to be thoroughly re-examined in order to prevent one of art history’s most healthy assets from ending up in a care home rather than thriving in its own surroundings.

1    The relevant papers can be downloaded as PDF files at www.rijksoverheid.nl/ministeries/ocw/documenten-en-publicaties/kamerstukken/2011/06/10/meer-dan-kwaliteit-een-nieuwe-visie-op-cultuurbeleid.html.