Margaretha Cornelia Boellaard
1795–1872 · Dutch painter, lithographer and art collector
Margaretha Cornelia Boellaard (Utrecht, 1795 – Utrecht, 1872) was a Dutch painter, lithographer and art collector. Born into a wealthy noble family, she trained at a time when women had limited access to formal art education, and her career offers a good view of women's artistic activity in nineteenth-century the Netherlands.
She took private lessons from the portrait painters Christiaan van Geelen and his son, also called Christiaan, as well as from the landscape painter Cornelis van Hardenbergh. In 1825 she was allowed to audit classes at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The collector Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans let her copy works from his collection. From 1826 to 1843 she regularly exhibited at Amsterdam's Exhibition of Living Masters, and in 1834 the Academie Minerva awarded her a prize for her painting Meisje met bloemen (Girl with Flowers).
In 1858 she became the first woman honorary member of the Genootschap Kunstliefde, an artists' society in Utrecht. Around 1864 her declining eyesight made painting impossible, and she devoted herself entirely to collecting, using her collection for lectures and discussions at artists' societies in Amsterdam, The Hague and Dordrecht.
She never married, and she bequeathed most of her possessions to the Kunstliefde, including her house on the Oudegracht, which became a museum and exhibition hall in 1905. The hall's rental income went into a fund bearing her name, which since 1984 has financed the Boellaard Prize, awarded to Utrecht artists and, since 2013, to artists aged 50 or older with Utrecht roots.