Willem Hofhuizen ( 1915 – 1986) Dutch painter
and Expressionist.
From Wikipedia
Wilhelmus Johannes Maria (Willem) Hofhuizen was born in Amsterdam on
27 July 1915 but a few years later his parents moved to Roermond, where
Willem spent his childhood at the Kapellerlaan. In 1931 he went to
Nijmegen and then to Amsterdam to study at the teachers training college
and later at the State Academy for the Visual Arts in Amsterdam, under
Jurres and Campendonk. His fellow students at the Academy included Jaap
Min, Karel Appel, Corneille and many others who would later rise to
fame, as well as Jos Hagemeijer (1920-1991), whom he would later marry
and who was a talented artist in her own right. However, it was the
Kapellerlaan and the nearby chapel in Roermond that had the most
profound impact on Hofhuizen's emotional development. There, he
developed his emotional bond with the Catholic church and his sense of
the monumental. In Amsterdam, where he had his first workshop at the
Lauriersgracht, he soon felt the urge to go the "Catholic south" of the
Netherlands, far south, as he later told his friends. In 1944, during
the second world war, he moved to the "liberated" city of Deurne (where
he stayed with Hendrik Wiegersma, general practitionar and fine artist,
and Peer van de Molengraft, fine artist) at the request of industrialist
and arts patron Henk te Strake and in 1946 he moved further south to the
“Catholic” city of Maastricht, where he was to remain for the rest of
his life. In Deurne his first son, Peter, was born. Later the Hofhuizens
had a daughter, Josée, and another son, Domien. Willem Hofhuizen had his
second workshop in Maastricht at the Pieterstraat in the old mill above
the workshop of Hubert Felix, a glazier. When this was to be demolished
as part of a city redevelopment project, the municipality offered him
all the space he wanted in the school for canal-boat children at the
Lage Kanaaldijk, for a symbolic sum. There he continued to work and -
after the judicial separation from his wife in 1956 - live, until his
death on 23 December 1986. After his separation Tinie van Bragt - the
wife of Tonnie van Bragt, professor at the Academy for the Visual Arts
Jan van Eyck in Maastricht - cared for him for almost twenty years. She
did his laundry for him and brought him food. To soften his grief and
relieve his loneliness she sometimes came to read a book or exchange a
few words with him at his house in the evening. Hofhuizen spent the last
ten years of his life with his bosom friend, the painter Petran
Vermeulen (1915-1988), and his dear friend Marianne Bakels. After Willem
Hofhuizen’s death Petran Vermeulen said he wished that he, too, were
dead. Two years later his wish was fulfilled.
