Curriculum vitae and work

Robert van Langh was born in Oosterhout, Noord-Brabant on 19 June 1968. He started out at the MAVO Willem van Duvenvoorde secondary school in Oosterhout. After that, he attended the vocational secondary school Middelbare Detailhandel School St. Olof in Breda and trained as a goldsmith at the Vrije Technische School ‘Technicum’ in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1992 he took a course in Metal Restoration and Conservation at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1995, he started working at Opleiding Restauratoren in Amsterdam, where, until 2006, he was responsible for setting up and running the course to become a metal restorer. In 1995, he also spent two months working at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, after which he went on to work at the Rijksmuseum.

In 1998, he carried out a brief research project on behalf of the Rijksmuseum at the Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was appointed Head of the Department of Metal Restoration in 2001, and in 2006 he became Head of the Department of Conservation & Science of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In September 2006, he started his PhD research in the Department of Materials Engineering of the 3mE Graduate School (Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) at Delft University of Technology, where, in 2012, he earned his PhD with his thesis entitled: “Technical Studies of Renaissance Bronzes, The use of neutron imaging and time-of-flight neutron diffraction in the studies of manufacture and determination of historical copper objects and alloys”. In 2011, he was selected as a museum scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where he spent three months.