Bob Haak (art expert)

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.

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 Rijks, 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.^[1] It was during this project that involved leading Rembrandt experts that Haak first got the idea to start a research project to assist in correct attributions. It was his opinion that much of Rembrandt's attributed work at that time was in fact the work of prominent Rembrandt pupils, each of whom deserved attention for their own qualities and achievements. The pressure to keep a Rembrandt attribution was (and still is) often too high however to do much about it.