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Herman Heijenbrock

Herman Heijenbrock (1871-1948), was a Dutch writer, painter, pastel draughtsman, and lithographer. He was the son of a baker and merchant in marine equipment. He learned to paint at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. Soon after graduation he visited the Borinage, a coal-mining district in Belgium. He found work in a theater making backdrops and later went to work as an art-journalist and draughtsman for the Rotterdams Nieuwsblad, which he quit in 1898 to become a professional landscape painter in Noordwijk. He returned to the Borinage and started to work as an artist with more and more success. Heijenbrock visited places that had an industrial center to paint and sketch modern industrial workers at everyday tasks. He visited Saargebiet, Wales, the Midlands in Engeland and shipyards in Scotland. In Sweden he painted quarries and pine forests to show the raw materials for building roads, railways, and the paper industry. In the Netherlands he mostly painted the harbours, but when World War I broke out he was confined to the Dutch borders and began to visit local industrial sites. In his enthusiasm to show the entire industrialization process, he began to collect various modern instruments and inventions. In 1921 he joined the board of the Vereeniging voor Beeldende Kunsten Laren-Blaricum, an artist collective that still exists today in. In the same years he  had collected enough for a museum, and in 1922 he held an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. A few years later he managed to found the Stichting Museum van den Arbeid and installed his budding museum collection in the attic of the Veiligheidsmuseum, Amsterdam.Laren art colony and politics.  Heijenbrock's works often hang in museums near the old factories that commissioned them, such as the Hoogovensmuseum, Nemo, the Amsterdam Museum, and the museum in Helmond. He became a member of the Amsterdam artist collective Arti et Amicitiae, and in 1933 he helped found the Goois Museum in Hilversum. He became known as 'de schilder van licht en arbeid' (the painter of light and work) and won many commissions for "portraits" of factories by leading Dutch businessmen.

January 21st  2025

 

 
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