Dutch museum reconsiders art loans to US after Trump's cuts

A leading museum in the Netherlands has said it is reconsidering lending works from its collection to US museums amid the uncertainty wrought by Donald Trump's funding cuts and ideological impositions.

- Ashifa Kassam

Martine Gosselink, the director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which has in its collection Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, said the turmoil had left her team wary of lending pieces to American museums.

She said the Mauritshuis had for years worked in tandem with art historians and curators across the Atlantic, in a constant conversation involving loans of artwork and research collaborations, but in recent months - as the US administration led by Trump seeks to slash funding and targets exhibits over what it sees as "improper, divisive or anti-American ideology" - politicians had started to increasingly creep into this conversation.