Bob Haak

Bob Haak (22 January 1926 – 15 May 2005) was a Dutch art expert known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.

Career From 1954 to 1963 he worked in the department of paintings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. From 1963 he was curator at the Amsterdam Museum, the museum which today is still the formal owner of the Rembrandt paintings on show at the Rijks, including The Night Watch.

In 1956 he worked on the Rembrandt commemorative exhibition in the Rijksmuseum, where certain paintings were on show which hadn't been back to Amsterdam for decades, such as the pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit. It was during this project that involved leading Rembrandt experts that Haak first got the idea to start a research project to assist in attributions. The project's aim was a comprehensive study of all of Rembrandt's paintings and resolving the uncertainties surrounding the authenticity of many paintings, to which several scholars had turned their attention.

The next year, 1969 Gerson published an update of Abraham Bredius' 1935 catalog of 611 Rembrandt paintings with his attributions based on connoiseurship. Haak had applied a similarly contextual approach to his study of Rembrandt's pupils and contemporaries. His 1982 book, The Golden Age: Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, received the Karel van Mander Prize in 1985.

However, differences of opinion within the team came to a head in 1993, when Haak withdrew from the RRP, along with Bruyn, Levie, and Van Thiel.

Family and World War II Haak was the son of Jur Haak and Jet van Eek. His father was a footballer in the Netherlands national team, and a record high jumper and both parents were teachers at the Montesorri school in Amsterdam. The whole family were active in the resistance during the Germany occupation.

In August 1943, Bob was arrested while trying to deliver a Jan Campert book to some family friends.

His mother died of "malaria" in Reichenbach in December 1944, his father died of exhaustion in Sachsenhausen in January 1945. Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen records Langenbielau as Henriette's place of death on 6 December 1944 and Sachsenhausen as Jurriaan's place of death on 30 January 1945; confirmation of the stated causes of death remains needed.