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I'm following the Arts of the Netherlands research master's programme at the University of Amsterdam and I'm an intern in the History department at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

I'm researching the stained-glass windows in the Great Hall of the Rijksmuseum for a scholarly article. The architect Pierre Cuypers was responsible for the decoration of the Neo-Gothic building, together with Victor de Stuers, a cultural official, and Joseph Alberdingk Thijm, professor of aesthetics and art history at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. The idea was that the interior and exterior should form an organic whole, and all the decorative features must have a didactic function. For the Great Hall's decorative scheme, comprising of a terrazzo mosaic floor, murals and stained-glass windows, the three men conceived a visual programme that provides an idealised picture of Dutch art history.

To date, very little scholarly research has been devoted to the creation, between 1882 and 1884, of the five stained-glass windows in the Great Hall. I want to fill that gap with this article.

My research focuses on the windows' iconographic programme, the choice of the glassmaker William Francis Dixon from London and the execution of the commission. I also discuss the windows' imagery, which provide an overview of the most important representatives of Dutch art history. It is striking that the windows feature two artists who had little or no place in the Dutch art-historical canon in the late 19th century: the medieval painter Willem van Heerle and the Renaissance sculptor Jan Aertsz. van Terwen. The inclusion of these relatively unknown artists clearly shows that Cuypers, De Stuers and Alberdingk Thijm conceived an ideologically coloured programme that reflected not only Protestant Holland at the time of the Republic but also the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. By assembling the best artists and artworks from different eras and provinces, the three men attempted to portray the nation's cultural past in a more inclusive way.

I have consulted various archives relating Cuypers and the Rijksmuseum (archive codes CUBA, CUCO and RYKS). Files RYKSd65-d66, concerning the supply and installation of the stained glass for the windows were an obvious starting point. These files include work plans and drawings, letters and notes relating to the realisation of the stained-glass windows. The copy books of letters sent from in the period 1880-84 and the documents on the iconographic programmes of the entire museum building (RYKSd224) also proved to be of great importance to my research. Thanks to these archives, I was able to reconstruct and contextualise the realisation of the stained-glass windows in the Rijksmuseum's Great Hall.