EGBERT HAVERKAMP-BEGEMANN

HAVERKAMP-

BEGEMANN--Egbert. The trustees, faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University deeply mourn the loss of our colleague, mentor and friend Egbert Haverkamp-Bege- mann who died in New York on August 5. Born in the Netherlands in 1923, Professor Begemann received his PhD cum laude in art history from the University of Utrecht in 1958 and came to the U.S. the following year, spending six months at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and six months at Harvard. His long and distinguished career as a scholar, curator and teacher of the art of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century continued at Yale (1960-1974; where he served as curator of Drawings and Prints at the university's Art Gallery and department Chair from 1970 to 1974), and, since 1978, at NYU. Begemann nurtured several generations of scholars of Dutch and Flemish art who have continued his legacy in museums and universities throughout this country and abroad. One of his former students, Mariet Westermann, former Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and currently Executive Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation stated, on learning of his passing, "What a remarkable and wonderful life he led, and legacy he leaves." Begemann was an expert on both famous and less well-known artists of the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age and his books and essays on Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Hercules Segers and others, are foundational texts for modern studies of the art of the Netherlands. The history of prints and drawings, their styles and techniques, was his most beloved pursuit. Begemann was named Honorary Fellow of The Pierpont Morgan Library where, from 2001 to 2004 he was Acting Head in the Department of Drawings and Prints. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, and held the post of Curator of Seventeenth-Cen- tury Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a number of years. Also at the Metropolitan, Dr. Begemann was coordinating scholar of the Robert Lehman Collection from 1980 to 2014. At the time of his death, Dr. Begemann was the John Langeloth Loeb Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Fine Arts. A memorial will be organized at the Institute later in the fall.