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From the collection of Johannes Fredericus Samuel Esser (1877-1946): a versatile man and passionate collector (Lots 78-95).
The life of doctor and art collector J.F.S. Esser reads like an exciting novel. Everything he undertook in his life, he did with passion and with boundless energy.
Esser was born in 1877 in Leiden. As a boy he learned to play chess and he soon realized he was talented. He organised chess clubs at the age of sixteen and in 1913 he became Dutch champion. He believed that his knowledge of chess had been of great value, he said when he later looked back on his life. Playing chess taught him to focus, observe, make decisions quickly and rationally and to work strategically. Those qualities were very useful to him in his function as a doctor.
In 1897 Esser started his medical studies in Leiden. After receiving his degree in 1903 he went on a trip as ship's doctor to the Azores, Venezuela, Curacao and New York. Back in the Netherlands, he worked as a general practitioner in the Johannes Verhulst in Amsterdam between 1905 and 1912. As a music enthusiast and art lover, he visited the Concertgebouw and started collecting art actively. Among the patients in his practice were painters Georg Hendrik Breitner and Jan Sluijters. They invited him to their studios and introduced him to other artists. In 1908 Esser bought a house at the Willemsparkweg 156, which he largely renovated with care and decorated in traditional Dutch style. On his invitation, artists gathered weekly in the basement of his house to discuss art.
Esser brought together 800 works in just seven years of mostly young and, at that time, barely recognized artists. He was the first serious collector of work by Piet Mondriaan, at a time when Mondriaan was forced to teach to make ends meet. Characteristic for Esser's way of collecting was the direct relationship he maintained with the artists. He bought, negotiated or exchanged in direct contact with them. And with some artists he befriended, thus acquiring an exceptional amount of works by Leo Gestel and Jan Sluijters.
Collecting in a broader sense was something he kept doing throughout his life and what stuck to him like a second nature. He was a merchant and a weeler-dealer who with courage, intuition, attention to quality and business acumen knew how to strike at the right time. Over the years, his interest in terms of collecting broadened. Besides art he collected everything he found interesting; whether it concerned land, houses, shares, furniture, antiques, china, medical instruments, skeletons, glass eyes, all sorts of old tools and cameras. 'As a child we had to sort out nails, putting the straight and the curved ones in different boxes', according to the memory of one of his daughters.
Esser sold his practice in Amsterdam in 1913 because he wanted to carry on the craft of surgery. He had a special interest in treating facial deformities and developed revolutionary methods in plastic surgery. In this field he was an absolute pioneer. Because of the many war victims in World War I plastic surgery developed rapidly. In 1915 he went to Bnro in the Czech Republic, where he joined the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a war surgeon. Then he worked and lived in Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. In 1927 he settled in La Grillère, a castle in France near Faye-la-Vineuse. For the winter months he bought a villa in Monaco which he, like La Grillère, decorated with art and other treasures from his collection. Meanwhile, Esser became fulfilled with the dream of establishing an independent 'surgery free-state'.
It had to become a mini-state with its own form of government, preferably on an island, where people with genetic abnormalities or mutilation of war from around the world could be helped and rehabilitate. To achieve this ideal, Esser traveled across Europe to gather adhesion statements, but eventually his attempts failed. In 1940 he left for the United States where he lost his property due to false speculation. Alone and destitute he spent his last years in Chicago, where he died in 1946.
Esser's art collection, which the RKD in The Hague has reconstructed largely, consisted for the bigger part of drawings, watercolours and oil sketches. Esser had a preference for the sketchy and the 'unfinished', resulting in a huge collection of sketches in a variety of size and technique. The collecting of sketches suits his commercial practice: sketches he could always exchange. Another reason was that as a starting general practitioner, he did not have much money and simply was unable to buy paintings, especially in his early years as a collector. The Esser collection is special because it gives a good idea of the contemporary art that was on a rise in the early 20th century. The collection included works by artists of the Hague School, but particularly the works of the Amsterdam Impressionists like Breitner and Israels and the, at that time still young and soon 'ultra modern', artists like Gestel, Van der Hem, Sluijters and Mondriaan. The collection marks the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, a period which, as it turns out, was essential for the development of modern art.
We kindly thank Jacqueline de Raad for writing this entry.
Jan Sluijters (1881-1957)
Portrait of the artist's wife Greet
细节
Jan Sluijters (1881-1957)
Portrait of the artist's wife Greet
chalk, watercolour and pastel on paper
49 x 57 cm.
Executed circa 1909-1910.
Portrait of the artist's wife Greet
chalk, watercolour and pastel on paper
49 x 57 cm.
Executed circa 1909-1910.
出版
Anita Hopmans, Jan Sluijters 1881-1957. Aquarellen en tekeningen, Zwolle 1991, cat.no. 70, ill..
Mayken Jonkman, Jacqueline de Raad, Mondriaan, Breitner, Sluijters e.a., De Onstuitbare Verzamelaar J.F.S. Esser, Zwolle 2005, cat.no. 95.
Mayken Jonkman, Jacqueline de Raad, Mondriaan, Breitner, Sluijters e.a., De Onstuitbare Verzamelaar J.F.S. Esser, Zwolle 2005, cat.no. 95.
展览
's-Hertogenbosch, Noordbrabants Museum, Jan Sluijters 1881-1957. Aquarellen en tekeningen, 8 June-25 August 1991, cat.no.70.
Laren, Singer Museum, Mondriaan, Breitner, Sluijters e.a., De Onstuitbare Verzamelaar J.F.S. Esser, 13 December-28 April 2005, cat.no. 95.
Laren, Singer Museum, Mondriaan, Breitner, Sluijters e.a., De Onstuitbare Verzamelaar J.F.S. Esser, 13 December-28 April 2005, cat.no. 95.
荣誉呈献
Else Valk
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