Harm Henrick Kamerlingh Onnes (15 February 1893 – 20 May 1985 in

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...

) was a Dutch portrait painter and ceramist,

Mienke Simon Thomas Margaretha Wilhelmina Francina (Mienke) Simon Thomas (born 1954) is a Dutch art historian, curator and author, working as a senior curator at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. She is known for her works on the development of Dutch appli ...

(2008).
Goed in vorm: honderd jaar ontwerpen in Nederland
'' p. 188 who also produced designs for stamps and stained-glass windows. He is best known for the small, humorous vignettes of everyday life.

Life and work

Kamerlingh Onnes was born in

Zoeterwoude Zoeterwoude () is a municipality in the province of South Holland, Western Netherlands. It covers of which is water. It had a population of in . Located to the southeast of Leiden and north of Zoetermeer, the municipality of Zoeterwoude consist ...

in 1893. His father Menso Kamerlingh Onnes was a painter and member of the

Hague School The Hague School is a group of artists who lived and worked in The Hague between 1860 and 1890. Their work was heavily influenced by the realist painters of the French Barbizon school. The painters of the Hague school generally made use of relati ...

, who in 1911 gave his son permission to develop as an artist. He also gave him his first drawing and painting lessons.Kamerlingh Onnes, Harm
at gemeentemuseumhelmond.nl. One of his uncles was the painter Floris Verster, and another uncle the physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (21 September 1853 – 21 February 1926) was a Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate. He exploited the Hampson–Linde cycle to investigate how materials behave when cooled to nearly absolute zero and later to liquefy helium f ...

. In his early years from 1915 to 1925 his work was influenced by modernism. In 1918 he designed a number of abstract stained-glass windows for the Spark House, which was designed by

Jacobus Oud Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, commonly called J. J. P. Oud (9 February 1890 – 5 April 1963) was a Dutch architect. His fame began as a follower of the '' De Stijl'' movement. Oud was born in Purmerend, the son of a tobacco and wine merchant. A ...

. From 1925, he started to take the everyday reality as his subject, and from that time he only made figurative works. It was after a visit to the studio of Mondrian, that he had realized that abstract art was not for him. Some of his designs for stained-glass windows have discoveries of physicists Pieter Zeeman and Hendrik Lorentz as a subject. One of these stained-glass windows contained a portrait of Hendrik Lorentz and formulas devised by him that describe the behavior of electrons. Other stained-glass windows show the instruments to measure the splitting of spectral lines of atoms under the influence of a magnetic field is measured, the so-called

Zeeman effect The Zeeman effect (; ) is the effect of splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman, who discovered it in 1896 and received a Nobel prize ...

. He also made portraits of the physicists

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

and

Paul Ehrenfest Paul Ehrenfest (18 January 1880 – 25 September 1933) was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition a ...

. Kamerlingh Onnes' work was included in the 1939 exhibition and sale ''

Onze Kunst van Heden Onze Kunst van Heden (Contemporary Artists/Our Art of Today) was an exhibition held in the winter of 1939 through 1940 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Due to the threat of invasion in the years leading up to World War II, the Netherlands' g ...

'' (Our Art of Today) at the

Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum () is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the St ...

in Amsterdam. Interieur, aanzicht beschilderd glas-in-loodraam - Noordwijkerhout - 20367023 - RCE.jpg, Glass stained windows, Noordwijkerhout Postzegel 1929 voor het kind 6 cent.jpg, 6 cents stamp for the child, 1929 Tegel met decor van concentrische tekening in grijs en zwart op wit, 1953.jpg, Tile with geometric motif, 1953 In 1953 Kamerlingh Onnes with

Bert Nienhuis Lambertus (Bert) Nienhuis (14 November 1873 in Groningen – 1960 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch ceramist, designer and jewelry designer. Life and work Nienhuis was born in Groningen as the son of the broker Lambertus Nienhuis (1834–1890) and ...

Piet Wiegman Petrus Cornelis Constant (Piet) Wiegman (Zwolle, 18 April 1885 – Alkmaar, 30 September 1963 ) was a Dutch painter, graphic artist, sculptor, ceramist and puppeteer.Dirk Hubers and

Frans Wildenhain Frans Wildenhain also known as Franz Rudolf Wildenhain (June 5, 1905 – January 25, 1980) was a Bauhaus-trained German potter and sculptor, who taught for many years at the School for American Craftsmen (now School for American Crafts) at the Ro ...

, took part of the exhibition "five contemporary potters" in

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Municipal Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen () is an art museum in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The name of the museum is derived from the two most important collectors of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans and Daniël George van Beuningen. It is located at ...

, which was one of the first museum presentations of modern artisan ceramics in the Netherlands.

Selected publications

* ''Harm Henrick Kamerlingh Onnes: 80 jaar.'' Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Pays-Bas), 1973. * Harm Kamerlingh Onnes, Dirk A. Buiskool (1999). ''De reis van Harm Kamerlingh Onnes: brieven uit de Oost.'' * Willem Baars, Harm Kamerlingh Onnes (2000). ''arm Kamerlingh Onnes.''

References

External links

Kamerlingh Onnes, Harm H.
at the Netherlands Institute for Art History. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kamerlingh Onnes, Harm 1893 births 1985 deaths Dutch ceramists People from Zoeterwoude 20th-century Dutch painters Dutch male painters 20th-century ceramists 21st-century ceramists 20th-century Dutch male artists