H. P. Bremmer (Hendrikus Pieter, or Henk)

The artist, collector, art dealer, and critic H.P. Bremmer has been credited with revolutionizing the reception and collecting of modern art in The Netherlands through his publications and personal influence.

The son of hotel owners, Bremmer came from a middle-class background. He trained at the Academy for Drawing and Painting in The Hague between 1889 and 1890, and then began his career as a painter working in a style heavily influenced by divisionism. He converted into a studio the atticof the Hotel Rijnland in Leiden, owned by his parents, which quickly became a meeting place for artists, art lovers, and literary figures from The Netherlands and Belgium, including Johan Thorn Prikker, Jan Toorop, Henri van de Velde, and Theo Van Rijsselberghe, among others.

A meeting with the ethnologist, legal scholar, and sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, known as the founder of the social sciences in The Netherlands, proved decisive for the trajectory of Bremmer’s career. Steinmetz, whose students included Bremmer’s wife, Aleida Beekhuis, encouraged the artist to offer classis in art appreciation. It was through Beekhuis, a politically active women’s rights activist from a wealthy Frisian family, that Bremmer engaged further with an elite social world. Beginning in 1896 Bremmer began teaching classes under the title “practical aesthetics.”

Bremmer was a prominent early collector of works by Vincent van Gogh and played a key role in bringing attention to him. In 1899 Bremmer made his first documented purchase of the artist’s work, a figure study that he acquired from Van Gogh’s estate, and eventually owned twenty-five paintings and forty-seven drawings by him. Bremmer came to know of Van Gogh through connections such as the Dordrecht manufacturer Hidde Nijland, another early Dutch collector of the artist’s work. It was not long before Bremmer began to encourage the students in his art appreciation courses to collect Van Gogh’s paintings at a time when they were still plentiful on the market.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Bremmer founded and served as sole contributor for two art journals, Moderne kunstwerken (1904–10) and Beeldende Kunst (1913–40). In addition to publishing articles on European and Asian art, Bremmer used the journals to draw critical attention to the work of Van Gogh. He published writings on the artist regularly beginning in 1894, including his book Van Gogh: Inleidende beschouwingen (1911), a seminal text on the artist at a time when the public was still discovering his work.

As an art advisor and patron, particularly of Dutch modernist painters, Bremmer cultivated networks of prominent, well-to-do families and acquaintances who formed what came to be known as “Bremmer clubs” in cities throughout The Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Groningen. He influenced the tastes of major collectors such as Helene Kröller-Müller, who took Bremmer’s art appreciation course and in 1907 contracted with him to act as her art advisor and expand her collection. While she sometimes accompanied Bremmer, he mostly traveled alone to major cities throughout Europe to visit artists and art dealers and to make purchases on her behalf. By 1928, the year that Kröller-Müller established her foundation, Bremmer had grown her collection to five thousand works, primarily through purchase at auction houses. Between 1927 and 1935, Kröller-Müller’s collection of Van Gogh paintings, which Bremmer had assembled, traveled to several foreign cities, bringing attention to her collection, to Bremmer, and to the artist. These efforts ultimately led to the construction in 1938 of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, designed by architect Hendry van de Velde.

Bremmer provided financial backing to living artists including Piet Mondrian, Charley Toorop, and Bart van der Leck. He began supporting Mondrian in 1916 at the request of the critic and museum director W. J. Steenhoff and continued to do so until the painter moved to Paris in 1920. He purchased paintings from Mondrian during the artist’s early transition to abstraction, acquiring fifteen works, including Tableau No. 3 Composition in Oval (1913; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and a number of other nonobjective compositions from the late 1910s. In addition to acquiring paintings for his own collection, he sold works by Mondrian to collectors like Kröller-Müller and Griettie Smith-van Stolk. During that time he kept Mondrian and van der Leck financially afloat by giving them an allowance that provided them the freedom to paint without the concern for wage-earning and gave the Kröller-Müllers first access to the artists’ best paintings. Bremmer also utilized his skills as a dealer in his art appreciation classes, facilitating the sale of works by his favored artists—most notably Floris Verster, van der Leck, John Rädecker, and Toorop—directly to his students.

In the decades that followed, Bremmer continued to influence museum collecting practices and finance exhibitions. He mentored Dirk Hannema, the son of a noble family who had looked to Bremmer for guidance on building their collection. In 1921 Hannema became the director of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, an institution that had long received donations from wealthy devotees dubbed “Bremmerites.” Hannema’s acquisitions for the museum—including works by Giorgio de Chirico, André Derain, Gino Severini, Jan Sluijters, Toorop, and van der Leck—bore the imprint of Bremmer’s tastes.

By the end of his life, Bremmer was one of the most prolific collectors in The Netherlands, having amassed 556 paintings and drawings, and 793 sculptures and ceramic objects. Among the artists represented were Mondrian, Johan Thorn Prikker, Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, and Floris Verster, Vilmos Huszar, John Rädecker, Toorop, Jan Sluijters, and van der Leck. Bremmer’s heirs sold his collection at auction in 1990.