Museum Panorama Mesdag opens the first big overview exhibition of the Norwegian-Dutch artist Betzy Akersloot-Berg (1850-1922) on Saturday 3 October 2026.
Betzy Akersloot-Berg. One of a kind brings together more than 115 works and can be seen until 28 February 2027.
According to the museum, new research shows not only how she developed as an artist, but also how she ran her career as a business and built an international reputation.
The exhibition includes 89 paintings, 15 works on paper, nine photographs and four special objects.
Loans come from Museum Tromp’s Huys on Vlieland, the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and the Perspektivet Museum in Norway and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
“Thanks to the research of recent years and an appeal to private and commercial collections, we have a sharper picture of Betzy than ever,” director Minke Schat says.
“We can finally show her in full: as an artist, as a traveller and as an entrepreneur, but also as a friend of the Mesdags, with whom she had a special and close bond.”
A sea painter on her own course
Akersloot-Berg worked in a period when women had almost no access to art academies.
She travelled independently through Norway and the rest of Europe, added private lessons at home and abroad where she wanted them, and worked in Oslo, Munich, Paris and The Hague while visiting international exhibitions.
In her paintings she studied the interplay of light, air and water, and critics praised her strong brushwork and her feeling for atmosphere.
With the seascape she also chose a genre that around 1900 was dominated by male painters, and exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad helped her build a position of her own.
After her death her work, like that of many artists of her generation, gradually became less familiar to the wider public.
Copyright and prices
Guest curator Marguerite Tuijn says Akersloot-Berg applied copyright to her work during her lifetime, which would place her among the first artists in the Netherlands to do so.
Notes on the backs of some works served as a guarantee to buyers that she would not paint the same subject again, which allowed her to ask a higher price.
Her paintings sold for 1,200 to 2,000 guilders, a considerable sum at the time and comparable to prices paid for work by the Mesdags and Jozef Israels.
She kept an eye on the market in her choice of subject too, showing Dutch scenes in Norway and Norwegian coastal views in the Netherlands.
A painting with the English title The coast of the bay, which shows a French bay, was made for the English market.
Her work was sold through established dealers including Goupil in The Hague and Van der Wilk in Haarlem, and it was shown at the world exhibition in Paris.
Friendship with the Mesdags
The link with Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831-1915) began at an international exhibition in Vienna in 1882, where Betzy Berg, then still unmarried, came across his work.
His seascapes made an impression on her and were part of the reason she moved to The Hague a few years later to ask his advice and learn more about marine painting.
She lived in Scheveningen, in hotel Rauch, from 1885 until 1889 or 1890.
The museum stresses that she was not a pupil of Mesdag but a professional artist who wanted to talk shop with him.
In 1888 she worked on the restoration of the Panorama of Scheveningen after the canvas returned from Munich, and a close friendship grew with Hendrik Willem and Sientje Mesdag-van Houten (1834-1909) that demonstrably stayed warm until shortly before Sientje’s death.
For Mesdag’s seventieth birthday Akersloot-Berg made a stained glass window.
Vlieland and the highlights on show
After her marriage to the Dutchman Gooswinus Akersloot, she found her artistic home on Vlieland.
From the house that is now Museum Tromp’s Huys she spent decades building a large body of work centred on the sea, the coast and changing weather, and she went on travelling through Europe from the island.
Museum Tromp’s Huys holds the largest collection of her work in the world and is one of the partners behind the exhibition.
Alongside familiar paintings, the show includes works that have rarely or never been on public display.
Among the highlights are De Lofoten from 1884 by her teacher Otto Sinding, on loan from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and the monumental Na de Storm by Akersloot-Berg from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
An early painting from 1892 showing the arrival of the German emperor Wilhelm II at a whaling station, Keizerlijk schip voor de kust van het eiland Skoroya, comes from the Perspektivet Museum in Tromso.
A richly illustrated monograph, also called Betzy Akersloot-Berg.
One of a kind, appears alongside the exhibition and is the first substantial publication on the artist.
Contributors include Tuijn, art historian Jenny Reynaerts, historian Sunny Jansen, Museum Panorama Mesdag and Museum Tromp’s Huys.
Waanders is the publisher, the book costs 35 euros and it comes out in Dutch and English.
The museum is also putting on a public programme of lectures and guided tours about her life and work.
If the exhibition leaves you wanting more, take a look at our rundown of the museums in The Hague.
