Pieter J. J. van Thiel

Pieter J.J. van Thiel (1928–2012) was a Dutch art historian known mostly as one of the founders of the Rembrandt Research Project.

From 1964-1991 he was director of the department of paintings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, where he took over from Bob Haak. He wrote the 1976 catalogue "All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam" (a supplement was published in 1992), which was finished the same year that The Night Watch was restored.

It was during that major restoration project that he was co-author of the first three volumes of the Corpus of Rembrandt paintings.

Van Thiel was a co-founder of the Rembrandt Research Project in 1968, which he left just after retirement in 1993. He was a cataloguer and a major writer of the RRP and contributed to what was published in three volumes as A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings between 1982 and 1989.

Notable works