Flourish: The Portraits of Kehinde Wiley at Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam

by Rossella BLUE Mocerino in collaboration with Sherry Fyman 

The Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam offers a glimpse into the opulent lifestyle of the wealthy Van Loon family. The collection includes family portraits, antique furniture, silver, porcelain, and all the other trappings of a well-to-do Dutch family—including the downstairs quarters for the servants.

While the family traces its roots back to the early 17th century, what might be missed by the casual viewer is the true source of their wealth. Willem van Loon was a founder of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), a corporation that came to dominate global trade through the expansion of Dutch colonialism and slavery. Later, Jan van Loon served as a director of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which was deeply involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

So, what are the portraits of Kehinde Wiley doing here?

Kehinde Wiley is mainly known for his powerful portraits of people of color, set in the traditional poses of Old Master paintings. His immensely noble figures are surrounded by floral motifs that suggest Wiley’s intent is to emphasize their beauty and worth while simultaneously enwrapping them in a protective and loving floral embrace.

The models for the portraits shown at the Museum Van Loon are Surinamese; the artist traveled to Suriname specifically to find them. In these paintings, they wear the exact clothing they had on when Wiley approached them on the street, yet the final portraits are anything but casual. Wiley chose the people of Suriname to explicitly remind the viewer that the wealth on display in the Museum Van Loon came at the expense of a brutal, savage system of human enslavement.

His portraits hijack the traditional visual language of power—monumental scale, heroic poses, and ornate details—to critique historical exclusions and reposition who is deemed worthy of a majestic, authoritative representation. You won’t find a single one of Wiley’s portraits tucked away in the downstairs servants' quarters; instead, they are proudly displayed upstairs, hanging directly alongside the original historical portraits of the Van Loon family—exactly where they belong.

These new portraits by Kehinde Wiley are on exhibition at the Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam until November 30, 2025. The show, titled Flourish: Kehinde Wiley x Museum Van Loon, marks Wiley’s first-ever solo exhibition in the Netherlands.