Pentimenti - Stephan Vanfleteren Among the Masters

Sixteen photographs by Stephan Vanfleteren, fifteen of them new, hung one to a room among the paintings that prompted them. The museum warns on the page that several of them treat death directly.

The Mauritshuis has no temporary exhibition wing worth the name, and this show does not pretend otherwise. There is no separate gallery, no dedicated entrance and no additional ticket. Sixteen photographs by the Belgian photographer Stephan Vanfleteren have been placed one to a room across all sixteen rooms of the city palace, among the paintings that are always there. Some hang, some stand and some lie on the floor.

That decision is the whole argument of the show, and it is a riskier one than a separate hang would have been. A photograph in its own white room is judged against other photographs. A photograph screwed to the wall of a room that already contains a Vermeer, a Rembrandt or a Potter is judged against those, immediately and by every visitor who walks in, including the several hundred thousand a year who came for the Girl with a Pearl Earring and did not come for contemporary photography at all. The museum has put a living photographer in the least forgiving position available to it.

A pentimento is a correction: a change of mind the painter made on the canvas and painted over, an arm moved, a head turned, an animal altered, now recoverable with infrared and x-ray. The plural is the show's title. Vanfleteren takes the word past its technical meaning and applies it to the corrections people and societies make, or fail to make, over four centuries. The claim is that a seventeenth-century panel and a photograph made in 2026 are both records of somebody changing their mind under pressure.

The letters published alongside the show demonstrate this on a specific painting rather than asserting it in the abstract. Reading Paulus Potter's The Bull of 1647, the correspondents note that the animal appears to have been a cow before the painter made it a bull, that it seems assembled from the body parts of animals of different ages, that the direction of its gaze is anatomically impossible, and that the farmer's hand beside it is painted far too large. That is a catalogue of corrections and errors left visible in a picture routinely described as a masterpiece of observation from life, and it is a better argument for the show's thesis than any wall text.

The invitation came from Martine Gosselink, the museum's general director, who asked Vanfleteren to look at the whole collection through his own lens and then walked the rooms with him. Vanfleteren, born in Kortrijk in 1969, has spent two decades on raw black-and-white portraiture, documentary work and the photography of dead animals, and is not an obvious house choice for a museum whose reputation rests on Dutch and Flemish painting of the seventeenth century.

The pairing was worked out over two years and thirty letters, the first sent in February 2024 and the last in March 2026, published as a book rather than a catalogue. Fifteen of the sixteen photographs were made for these rooms. The sixteenth already existed: a photograph Vanfleteren made in 2022 for the museum's anniversary show FLASH BACK, responding to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp of 1632, and it is the one work in the show that had already been tested in this building.

The Mauritshuis prints a caution with the show: like the seventeenth-century masters, Vanfleteren does not avoid depicting death and mortality, and some images may be upsetting. A museum that puts this notice on a show hung inside its permanent collection is conceding something specific. A visitor cannot choose to skip this exhibition and still see the collection, because the exhibition is in every room of the collection. The subjects a reviewer counted include a dead dog, a bloodied figure of Christ, a scar, blankets belonging to migrants and the reproductive anatomy of cattle, and any of them may be met by somebody who bought a ticket to see a girl in a blue turban.

Coverage in the Dutch and Flemish press has been consistently favourable and has concentrated on one question above all others: whether a living photographer can be hung beside Rembrandt, Vermeer and Potter without looking diminished. The reviewers who have addressed it directly conclude that he can.