Henri ten Holt [antikvár]

Henri Friso ten Holt was born on 29 January 1884 in Utrecht in the Netherlands. For a year he took drawing lessons to prepare himself for his entrance examination to the National Academy of Arts (Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten), but finally he did not go in for this examination. Instead he took a three months* course at the Antwerp Academy under Professor de Vriendt. The work he did after that in Charleroi in the vicinity of the Borinage, the Belgian mining district, is no longer in existence. After having worked at Egmond in the province of North Holland for three years, he definitely moved to the neighbouring village of Bergen, where he is still living notwithstanding his transportable studio. He settled in Bergen in 1912. A year earlier, in 1911, he tookatrip to Brittany; the head of a Breton woman preserves the memory of this event. In 1914-1915 he stayed in Italy. In 1904, when he was twenty, he took his first trip to Paris. After-wards he went there repeatedly. In his younger years it was not so easy as it is now to get acquainted with this new international art centre. He only got into touch with modern art, when in 1911 the 'Modern Art Circle' started its regular exhibitions in the Stede-lijk Museum in Amsterdam. And the two little rooms in the Rijks-museum in Amsterdam, containing the Cézanne pictures from the Hogendijk Collection, were a veritable place of pilgrimage to him. These pictures made an ineffaceable impression upon his mind. Only rarely Henri F. ten Holt enabled the world to take notice of his remarkable work. He hid it as he hid his life. In the begin-ning of his career he showed a few works at the exhibitions of the 'Modern Art Circle' and the Society for the Advancement of Graphic Art, or in Vecht's and Goudstikker's galleries. Onthe occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday an honorary exhibition was held in thegallery of the'Artists' Centre Bergen* in June 1949, where he had shown works previously. But it was Willem Sandberg, the re-nowned ex-director of the 'Stedelijk' in Amsterdam, who made his later works, as for instance his large still lifes, the Horses and the Triptych, more widely known. The 'Apocalyptic Horses' raised a good deal of dust in part of the press, and only after this picture it may be said that the heavy cavalry of fame began to charge. The organization of an exhibition that wouldgive a com-plete survey of the work of this painter, who is so remarkable for the extraordinary development, teeming with conflicts, of his talent, is a thing that remains to be done. His relatíve lack of contact with the generál public was alsó referable to the fact that his works were immediately acquired and kept by priváté collectors, for this silent, reticent and retiring man has never had any reason to complain of a lack of interest and open-handedness in more priváté cirdes. It may be true that art is 'by the few for the few', but after all it is