Isabella Henriette van Eeghen

Isabella Henriette van Eeghen
Born	3 February 1913 Amsterdam
Died	26 November 1996
Nationality	Netherlands

Isabella Henriette van Eeghen or I.H. van Eeghen (1913 – 1996) was a Dutch historian who worked for the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

Van Eeghen was born in Amsterdam as the daughter of the banker Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen in an Amsterdam canal mansion on 497 Herengracht that today is known as the KattenKabinet. Her father and grandfather were directors of Van Eeghen & Co. a bank active on the Herengracht since the 17th-century. Today what remains of the firm is part of Bank Oyens & Van Eeghen. The young Isa was therefore quite wealthy, and determined to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, also called Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen, who in his free time set up the Vondelpark and was responsible for various improvements to the Van der Hoop museum in 1854, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum. It was the elder Van Eeghen who paid to have the paintings in the Amsterdam surgeons' guild restored in 1865, among them of course the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

Isa attended the local girls' school MMS and then continued at the Gymnasium, eventually earning her degree in history from the University of Amsterdam. She earned her doctorate with a study on the cloisters and monasteries of Amsterdam in 1937. She then started a study to become archivist, choosing the history of the Walloon community of Amsterdam as her object of study. She was forced to do this in a volunteer capacity because she was refused a job at the Amsterdam archives. When she gained her archivists diploma in 1943, she was still not considered for a job as archivist, so she accepted a job as administrator at the archives in 1944. It wasn't until 1947 when the Maastricht archives offered her a job as archivist that the Amsterdam archives appointed her chartermaster. She was not the first woman in such a position, because Gerda Kurtz, who had similar troubles with discrimination, had been working at the Haarlem archives since 1938, albeit at a lower salary than male colleagues.

It was thus at the age of 32 that Isa first left her parents' home and rented rooms along with a group of five other women in a canal mansion on the nearby Prinsengracht, though she continued to eat dinner with her parents. In 1946 she became the first woman to be in the steering committee of the Amsterdam historical society Genootschap Amstelodamum. From 1950 to 1984 she was the editor of both its monthly magazine as its yearly book of essays Jaarboek Amstelodamum.

Among various projects, she was responsible for the exact dating and attribution of Amsterdam artworks of the 17th-century, most notably Elsje Christiaens.

References

• Author page in the Digital Library for Dutch Literature