Connoisseur; specialist in Dutch seventeenth-century painting and iconography; Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Gudlaugsson was born in Skagen as the son of the Icelandic poet Jonas Gudlaugsson (1887-1916). His mother, Maria Ingenohl, was a Dutch woman raised in Germany. After the death of her husband, she moved with Gudlaugsson, her only child, to Berlin. Gudlaugsson studied art history in Berlin and in Munich. His teachers in Berlin included Oskar Fischel and Wilhelm Pinder.