The young Isa was therefore quite wealthy, and determined to follow in the footsteps of her grandfather, also called Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen, who in his free time set up the Vondelpark and was responsible for various improvements to the Van der Hoop museum in 1854, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum.

It was the elder Van Eeghen who paid to have the paintings in the Amsterdam surgeons' guild restored in 1865, among them of course the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

[1] Isa attended the local girls' school MMS and then continued at the Gymnasium, eventually earning her degree in history from the University of Amsterdam.

[2] She was not the first woman in such a position, because Gerda Kurtz, who had similar troubles with discrimination, had been working at the Haarlem archives since 1938, albeit at a lower salary than male colleagues.

[2] Among various projects, she was responsible for the exact dating and attribution of Amsterdam artworks of the 17th-century, most notably Elsje Christiaens.