Queen Máxima receives a sharp sneer from the Telegraaf camp. Mark Koster dismisses her Volkskrant performance as a vain one one-woman show. “No Sylvie Meis, but a little tap!”
Last Christmas, none other than Queen Máxima led the readers of the Volkskrant Magazine as a real guide through the Royal Collections. The newspaper was very happy with that, because it already made an interview request a year and a half ago, but Telegraaf columnist Mark Koster is quite nervous about it.
Maxima central
Máxima functions in it Volkskrant article as cultural curator-in-chief. She guides the reader through an extensive archive of art, fashion, photos and historical objects of the House of Orange-Nassau. The reason is the 200th anniversary of that collection, which is largely kept at Noordeinde Palace and can be seen in museums throughout the Netherlands.
That heritage transcends Máxima as a person, but according to Mark, in the article she relates it very much to herself. “Máxima who puts herself at the center of the art collection of the royal family and a photo of her eye with Erwin Olaf photographing her,” he cynically writes. X.
Portrait within portrait
The passage that Mark refers to is about a work by Erwin Olaf, who died in 2023, who made portraits of the royal family on behalf of the court. Máxima explains a detail of her own portrait: a close-up of her eye, in which Erwin himself can be seen photographing her. She calls it a ‘portrait within a portrait’.
Máxima says: “This is a detail of the portrait he made of me. The detail zooms in on my eye, in which Olaf himself is reflected. A portrait within a portrait; a photo of him at work seen through my eye. While my portrait is of course a photo of me through his eye. It’s all in the eye of the beholderevery portrait is perception.”
Sylvie Meis
Mark really thinks this is a bit too much. He compares the moment with the kind of self-reflective admiration that you would rather expect from a celebrity who is mainly concerned with himself.
He sneers: “Me, myself and people who capture me. Not Sylvie Meis, but a touch.”