The Facts

On September 30, 2026, the Rijksmuseum and the Museo Nacional del Prado announced a joint research partnership focused on women in art and history. The collaboration will establish an international postdoctoral fellowship programme starting in September 2027, with recruitment beginning in October 2026, and an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in 2029 examining female leadership in the Habsburg Netherlands during the 16th century. The Prado's ongoing ‘El Prado en femenino’ initiative, which highlights women as artists and patrons, will inform the partnership, while the Rijksmuseum has since 2021 worked to increase visibility of women through acquisitions of works by artists such as Gesina ter Borch, Maria van Oosterwijck, and Marlow Moss.

The partnership signals a deepening institutional commitment to redressing historical gender imbalances in museum collections and scholarship. By pooling resources from the Rijksmuseum and the Prado—both major repositories of Habsburg-era art—the initiative targets a specific, under-researched period of shared Dutch-Spanish history. For collectors and curators, this collaboration may increase scholarly and market attention to 16th-century works by women artists such as Clara Peeters and Sofonisba Anguissola, whose legacies the Prado's prior exhibitions have already highlighted.