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This paper explores how an article by Marita Mathijsen on literary subsidies in the nineteenth century (1996, Nederlandse letterkunde) has served as a prelude to later research on post-romantic private literary patronage in The Netherlands on the one hand, and Dutch government policy on the other. It provides an overview of research carried out by Dutch researchers since 1996 into practices of and discourses on the public and private support of authors. Over the past two centuries, governments and private citizens have taken care of writers in multiple ways, with varying motives and with varying degrees of success. Since 1996, researchers have researched these practices from a number of angles. One important question they grappled with was whether these forms of public and private support are essentially similar and should be examined as such, or essentially different. Another dilemma: is it more effective to approach and examine writers after 1850 as passive recipients of charitable (emergency) aid, or to emphasize their role as (non)equal partners in the reciprocal relationships they maintained with their public or private benefactors? In the last section of the paper, the author outlines four directions in which (inter)national patronage research could develop over the next 25 years.